Ink and Bone
Jess Brightwell is the son of a book smuggler, living in London. He loves to read but does not have a knack for smuggling like his father, or his brother, does. Jess is sent to Alexandria, the ancient city with the biggest library of all, to be a postulant and try to get a place of work at the Library. His father sees this as a great opportunity for Jess to spy on the Library and possibly even smuggle out some books. But for Jess this is a clean start away from the hard world he grew up in, a chance for him to finally be around people who thinks the same as he does. But the road to work at the Library is long and lined with dangers Jess can’t fathom in his darkest dreams. It’s not a question of will he get a job as much as will he survive?
I thought right away that this seemed like a promising story. I’ve read a lot and I’ve read a lot of novels that remind me of other novels. Ink and Bone is very different indeed, since it revolve around books. For someone who reads much and loves books, this seems to be the perfect story. Almost too good to be true. And for me, it was.
I did like that the novel was all about the books. Nothing matters more than the books. Not other things, not other objects and certainly not lives. The most important thing is to protect the books, because they can’t protect themselves. But after a while this got too out of hand, the author’s intent I’m sure, but it was almost annoying reading about books like there was something wrong with them. Like it was their fault the world looked like it did. I am certain, however, that Caine meant to not to place the blame on books, but on people and how human beings handle and use power.
Caine painted a story about a young man who didn’t fit in with his family and was sent away because of it. He found himself a place in Alexandria, with its great library still standing, were he met kindred spirits. The world in which Jess lives is much different from the one we live in today. It takes place in the year of 2025 but it is vastly different.
I would like to explain what the map looks like, were the boarders go and generally how Jess' world is built and functions. But I have no idea, since Caine didn’t mention that very much at all. Maybe it’s not important to the story or maybe this is something that will appear in the sequel, but regardless, it was something that bothered me. All I found out was that Alexandria is something of the capital of the world, that England is at war with Wales, that America is not flourishing and that Austria no longer exists. But what of everything else? What does the world look like? How has the world turned into what Jess lives in today? It bothered me not knowing and that made me enjoy the novel a little less.
Other things that made me go from curious and interested to merely shrugging my shoulders while reading was at first, the chapters. They were so long. The first chapter didn’t even start until thirty pages in and then it lasted for another thirty. I had a hard time getting into the story, both adjusting to the way Caine built the novel and to the way she wrote it. It wasn’t writing that I enjoyed, at times it sounded good but it was for the most part bland. I found several spelling errors and some sentences had to be reread and could, even then, be hard to understand. It is sad that a novel about books was so disappointing in its own writing.
The characters didn’t entirely feel real and Jess wasn’t deep enough for me. I did know him, I just didn’t feel anything for him. Other characters, even those who played bigger roles, came and went without really leaving an imprint. It’s mostly a story about a class training to hopefully become workers at the Library, and so you get to follow them through classes and you see a great deal of their teacher, Scholar Wolfe. It was obvious that none of the students liked him and he did seem cold and distant, but what surprised me most was that all of the students was the best group gathered from around the world. The smartest and most brilliant minds which had the best hopes of being the future of the Library. But they seemed oddly surprised at the hard work rate they had to put into as postulants and they complained a lot that Wolfe was hard and too tough and generally neither fair nor just. Like they expected him to be kind and to coddle them. They heap a lot of hate on him but I didn’t feel like he deserved any of it. If anything, it felt like Caine wanted the reader to feel sorry for the students for having such a tough and hard time, which only made me wish Wolfe to be harder on them.
I do think this is a novel that had a lot of potential but alas, it didn’t quite reach the heights I knew it could’ve. It was far from bad but it felt plain, even though it had its fair share of action and plots twists. It felt like something was missing, but I’m not sure quite what that would be. More depth, perhaps. I will probably read the sequel, but I won’t count down the days until it comes out and I won’t return to Ink and Bone in the near future. That said, it might just be the novel for you, if you want to see what a world ruled by books could look like.