#a j hackwith

The main character is Claire, the librarian in charge of the Unwritten Wing. She’s competent but cold at the start of the novel, moody and brusque and a little ruse, and throughout the book we see her both blossom into a more caring individual and see aspects of her personality revealed to explain exactly why she’s like that. I liked Claire a lot, she’s a very compelling protagonist, and the undertone of her being good at her job but overwhelmed by not being that well-prepared, both for this particular journey and its demands and the job entire, was an interesting starting point for her character. She’s very compelling and realistically human, which stands out in particular in a story where most of the main characters aren’t human.

She’s joined by Brevity, her assistant and failed muse, Leto, a dead human turned into a demon, Andras, a powerful demon in charge of the Artefacts Wing, and some others she picks up on the way, and opposed by the angels Uriel and Remiel, and I think this is one of the areas where I failed to connect to the novel as it wanted me to. The amount of main characters was a bit overwhelming, and there’s not enough time between them to really get a firm grasp on who they are and their journey before focus needs to switch to another.

On the other hand, I really liked the worldbuilding in this novel. It starts with a relatively standard fictional afterlife - heaven and hell, and other afterlives like Valhalla existing on the side, powered by belief of them. Hackwith really shines, however, in her original concepts. The Unwritten Wing is such a cool idea! Characters escaping their books and coming alive, characters working against their clichéd or bad narratives jumping out to hang out in the library, it’s all a neat idea and maybe that’s the disconnect for me, I wanted the story to just linger on these concepts. There’s a real sense of a well-thought-out world with solid rules and ideas behind it in this novel, but the novel doesn’t feel the need to overexplain every little aspect of the universe, which I appreciated - though some of the novel is pretty exposition-heavy.

I think one of my main problems with this book was that there was so much going on at any given time. The narrative zips around from place to place and idea to idea without much room to breathe, and I found it a little hard to keep track of all the characters, where they were, and their motivations and secrets and everything. New concepts just kept being thrown out, and while they weren’t bad or unwelcome, it was still a lot to keep track of.

In addition, I didn’t find myself all that invested in the quest the characters were on. I’m not sure if that’s just a me thing, though? Looking for pages of a book that might give the holder immense power is a solid concept but I kept forgetting exactly why everyone was chasing it, or why it was so important. Again, that could just be me, I dunno.