Smoke and Iron / Rachel Caine

4.25 out of 5 stars

The opening moves of a deadly game have begun. Jess Brightwell has put himself in direct peril, with only his wits and skill to aid him in a game of cat and mouse with the Archivist Magister of the Great Library. With the world catching fire, and words printed on paper the spark that lights rebellion, it falls to smugglers, thieves, and scholars to save a library thousands of years in the making...if they can stay alive long enough to outwit their enemies.

Rachel Caine is becoming one of my favourite authors! Especially with this series, which offers plenty of twists & turns and lots of characters that you wish could spend time with (after the crisis is over, of course).

I love this whole idea of the Library of Alexandria surviving into modern times and becoming an evil empire! The whole ecosystem of knowledge, with the Library controlling as much as they can, with protest movements like the Book Burners and Ink Lickers, and the criminal smugglers, there is plenty of complexity around which to build an excellent plot.

Caine leaves it to the reader to figure out how it all might relate to our world today, instead of getting to explain-y, like some authors do. I love that she gives her young adult audience the opportunity to think for themselves about the issues and doesn’t preach to them.

I’m very much looking forward to the grand finale, Sword and Pen.