It's a lot of things, this saga. A love story, Livira and Evar, reaching out to each other across time and space and narrative construction. And a story with an idea, a question - is it better to build knowledge and pass it between generations, along with the attitudes and horrors that built it, biases and terrors moving between generations, pushing down on people until they're fossilised under the weight of the past - or to remove that knowledge and have people build something from nothing, making the same mistakes over and over and over again. There isn't a Big Answer for that Big Question, I think, but the book gives its characters the chance to explore the idea, to reach the edges of it, to try and unpick some of it, to perhaps build their own truths about what to do, much like the rest of us.
In looking at the big idea, the book definitely deals with some smaller ones as well. It explores the notion of identity. In a space where people skip between worlds and eras, who they are isn't necessarily who they may become. And as the space between the pages of the Library grows more unstable, people can find themselves echoes of what they thought they were, or being someone else entirely - or fighting to exist at all. There's a sense, looking around at the characters, that theyre both re-evaluating themselves and falling into versions of themselves that they're still struggling to define. Arpix and Clovis, whose budding romance was such a joy in the previous book, continue trying to find their way around their own prejudices and world shattering events to find each other, to find what they need in each over. And Livira and Evar continue t try and find each other at all, without falling into the pages of their own fictions. The book looks on these romances positively, shows us that they're people who matter, that their choices and feelings and needs matter. They're also saving the world, of course, or a world, or something like a world, but they're doing it for each other, for their friends and loves and the connections that they've made. I'm a sucker for Arpix and Clovis, to be fair, the gentle librarian and the explosive warrior, coming to an understanding across times and species that says, you're people, and you're wonderful for it. But we do see some old favourites as well - the Librarian Yute, for example, finds himself travelling a world that might be ours, in the borders of the exchange between the library (or libraries). It is...not to spoil it, but he finds himself in a part of history where librarians are less than welcome. And in struggling to understand what that world is, trying to see what makes it tear itself apart and build itself up again, in understanding costs and conflicts and humanity, Yute is our eyes into our own strength, resilience and bravery.
This is a book which isn't afraid to take chances, to flip the table and move the reader out of what they were expecting, and into something new. And it's a book with so many stories to tell. I must admit to enjoying them all - from Yute to Livira to Evar to Mayland and out into the world of siblings and friends and bit parts and people who are the heroes of their own story - and they all feel like they have self-realisation, have depth, have a reality of their own, looking back at you from the page. That they all have a story to tell. And they do. And that story, though I won't spoil it, is a thoughtful one. A kind one. Sometimes one that gives the reader a pang in the heart - good, or bad - and sometimes one that warms you from the inside out. It's a story that builds on what came before, and pushes it somewhere ne. It's a story that, at the last, will make you think and make you feel.
It's good, is what I'm saying, and if you've come this far in the series, it's worth your time.