Claire and Brevity were friends when Claire was Librarian of the Unwritten Wing and Brevity was her Assistant Librarian. Can they still be friends with Brevity as Librarian and Claire in charge of the Arcane Wing? And if Mommy and Daddy are fighting, will Hero and Rami choose sides?
When we last left our librarians, a devastating fire had destroyed most of the books in the Unwritten Wing and severely injured Hero. This was all thanks to the previous head of the Arcane Wing, who Claire had thought was her friend until he tried to take over the library.
They did their best to save the library and as many books as they could, but the Library decided Claire was unfit to continue as its Librarian, so it rejected her.
She is now head of the Arcane Wing, Brevity is the Librarian, Hero is Assistant Librarian, and Rami is working as Claire’s assistant in the Arcane Wing.
Claire is trying to give Brevity space so she can form her own identity as Librarian, but Brevity sees Claire’s distance as punishment for taking over her job. And, if she were being honest with herself (which Claire’s not good at) she’s probably avoiding the Library because it hurts too much. She experienced a lot of trauma there, even before the first book in this series started, and she’s not very good at dealing with it.
A couple things happen to throw a wrench into the uneasy peace they’ve developed over the past six months or so — although, how they know how much time has passed in Hell is beyond me. Do souls, muses, demons, or fallen angels sleep?
First, another Muse, Probity, who looked up to Brevity when Brevity was in the Muses Corps shows up and acts like she and Brevity are still friends, but she does not like Claire at all. She blames the entire disaster of the previous book on Claire, and claims the Unwritten Wing used to work with the Muses Corps, but the only reason they didn’t in the first book was because of Claire. She spots the wedge that has developed between Claire and Brevity and she does everything she can to widen it.
The second thing that disturbs everything is a giant well of ink that appears in the Arcane Wing. No one knows how it got there, but it soon becomes clear that it’s the ink from the unwritten books that were destroyed in the fire.
Claire and Brevity immediately clash over what to do with the ink, although it quickly becomes clear that the ink has a mind of its own.
While Claire and Brevity are fighting, Hero and Rami decide to team up and go on a quest to see what they can find out about this ink. They end up in the Unsung Wing, where they learn that unwritten books aren’t made up of paper and binding. They’re made up of ink. That’s where the magic of the story is.
SPOILER ALERT!!!
Also, Rami and Hero fall in love in the course of adventuring together. I kind of like it because they are so different from each other, but I think they’re different in ways that complement each other rather than being different in ways that make you wonder how those two ever got together?
It soon becomes clear that Probity sympathizes with Brevity’s banishment from the Muses Corps because she doesn’t think Brevity did anything wrong when she took an inspiration that was meant for a human creator and she kept it for herself.
Probity doesn’t think humans are worthy of inspiration. She thinks muses should be the ones to create stories, and she thinks the ink from the unwritten books will give her the power to do that.
But she’s not willing to test out the theory herself, and that should have been a huge red flag to Brevity. I think it was, but at that point, Brevity figured she was in too deep to back out. So another muse dies and yet another muse almost dies, but Claire is able to harness the power of the ink and heal the other muse Probity had used as her guinea pig.
Because of course only a human (even a dead human) can harness the power of untold stories.
I really liked this book because it talks about the power of stories and how hungry other beings are for that power. As a storyteller myself, it should come as no surprise that I appreciate a story that appreciates stories.
The one thing I did not appreciate about this book is that there are two separate instances in which the author teases Hero’s death … only to fake us out and come up with a way to bring him back. You can get away with that once and only once.