Ink and Bone (The Great Library, #1) by Rachel Caine
Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Great Library is in every city and controls the books of the world. Using alchemy to distribute the books those working for the library track down anyone with any in their possession and confiscate the materials. Ownership of books is expressly forbidden and anyone violating this law could even be sentenced to death.
Jess Brightwell’s family has been involved in the black market for books. He’s been raised to be a runner, delivering the books to those willing to pay the price and risk ownership. Jess has been sent to the library by his father to become a spy from the inside. He gets involved in the training only to find himself mixed up in the secrets of the library.
Ink and Bone was one of those reads I enjoyed from start to finish. Such an interesting world Rachel Caine had created for anyone who loves to read. It’s hard to imagine a world in which you could even die for trying to own a book but with bringing magic also into this world it became that much more interesting with the pursuit of keeping the books in the library’s possession.
The world building and character development in the story was excellent. A read that keeps you guessing in who you should be rooting for and who is actually the good guys versus the bad guys from start to finish. There are questions of who to trust and who is on the right side all throughout. A wonderful collection of characters that was just as fun getting to know as the plot behind the story.
Overall, definitely a series that I would recommend.
I received a copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Carries Book Reviews 
The plot of controlled knowledge has been done and overdone for decades.. BUT.. The glimpses you gave have peaked my interest.. my impression is that it promises something deeper than just power meglomaniacs running the show.. That actual interesting secrets have been created by the author and with an inside spy, maybe even some loyalties get conflicted with knowledge of the reasons (secrets) for knowledge being forbidden in the form of books.. Thanks for this post ! 😊
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Very true, but there were little interesting details all throughout this bringing the magic into the world Ms. Caine has created that I really enjoyed the world she created. I’ll be reviewing the second book in this series soon and hope that it continues to build an intriguing story. 🙂 Hope you enjoy it if you decide to check out this series yourself. 🙂
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AwesoMe review Carrie! I loved this book. Did you request the sequel?
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Yes, I’m going to be reading it too soon. Great series, I was wondering how this would be because I wasn’t overly impressed with the Morganville series, it was OK but this one was so much better. 🙂
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Awesome! I liked the Morganville Vampires, but the last few books petered out for me. Did you read her Weather Warden series?
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I only made it up to like 8 or 9 on Morganville, it seemed to get repetitive after awhile really. Go to party, something happens at party etc. So many things that just seemed to happen over and over again. Haven’t tried the Weather Warden series though, that one good? Couldn’t resist trying Ink and Bone since it was on Netgalley and glad I did.
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I definitely think you’d enjoy the Weather Warden series. And she ended it before it got repetitive.😊
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I’ll have to look into picking those up sometime then. Of course we know how the endless mountain of books goes… 🙂
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Sigh.😕
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*High 5’s!(literally :D)* Good to see we’ve got the same opinion on this one. As one of the comments here says something about the originality, I agree that it isn’t entirely original, of course, like you mentioned, the details really made it something outstanding :). Great review!
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Thanks Anne! I think the other comment took my bringing up the books being illegal as I meant it was a new idea but I was more along the lines thinking this is a worse horror story to me than a zombie apocalypse, just can’t imagine going without my books. 🙂
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Rereading my own comment here, I’m making a note to self now to not make any comments on my phone ever again on WordPress xD. I’m always leaving out words or worse…autocorrect! But anyhoo, yes, I definitely agree with you on that as well. We can survive a zombie apocalypse, as long as there are books to read between chopping off heads and all XD.
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Haha no worries, I have plenty of my own typos and I usually couldn’t even blame a phone for it. I think sometimes my brain goes faster than my fingers do when I’m typing. LOL
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Give it another decade or so and we won’t need our fingers for ‘typing’ anymore! 😀
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Well they already have some voice activated things… the only problem is those make more mistakes for you than auto-correct does. LOL
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Indeed they do! My god, ‘read this’ becomes ‘penis’ and so on :’). Let’s hope they perfected that stuff by then ;).
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LOL!!! And that would be exactly what would happen to me if I used the voice apps. 🙂
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*but >.>
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