A Quick Note On This Review: This article includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org as a way of supporting both local bookshops and my own ability to write.
Spoilers: This review does contain some light spoilers about the outcomes of The Library of the Unwritten and The Archive of the Forgotten. I recommend starting with those works before reading on.
Claire, as the head of the Arcane wing, is looking for ways to protect Hero when she’s called up before Malphas, the bloodthirsty head of Hell’s armies, for failing to provide an adequate inventory for what lies in the Unwritten Library. Suspecting that Malphas knows what Claire herself recently learned about the nature of the books housed in the Library, she attempts to bargain with Malphas, leading to the loss of the Arcane wing, but gaining an opportunity in the process to set the Library free from the realms it inhabits.
The God of Lost Words by A.J. Hackwith is the third and final book in the Hell’s Library series, and it details a race to preserve the Library from the clutches of Hell now that its secret has been revealed to Claire and her friends. Like the other books in the series, The God of Lost Words takes the perspectives of several different characters to drive the plot forward, much the way it did in the other two novels in the series. However, in The God of Lost Words, it feels more directly connected with the journey the characters take as Hackwith pivots from focusing on their internal state like she did in The Archive of the Forgotten back to moving the characters through a physical space in order to drive the plot.
Something that struck me about The God of Lost Words was the way Hackwith portrayed the impact stories can have on the people who love them the most. While most assume that to love books you must be a librarian, writer, or bookshop owner, Hackwith’s novel creates permission for someone to love stories even when they aren’t directly contributing to the creation or curation of them. The threat to the Library requires the characters to gather all the wings of the institution together in order to find a solution, and in doing so the reader gets introduced to a variety of styles of librarianship and storytelling that can feel at the same time novel and restrictive; few consider the last moments of one’s life a worthy story to tell, for example, and yet there’s also a possessiveness that borders on avarice from the librarian who curated them as he tries to protect his wing from being subsumed in Claire’s schemes. Yet, despite these difficulties, the behaviors of the stories themselves point to a willingness and desire to be shared that supercedes any one individual’s attempts to control the narrative.
For casual readers, The God of Lost Words would appeal to anyone who has enjoyed the other books in the Hell’s Library series, or who enjoys reading books about storytelling more broadly. Hackwith’s novel becomes a bit meta at times, which could present some difficulties if someone doesn’t enjoy that kind of storytelling, but she couches it in witty dialog and thoughtful plotting enough that anyone who enjoys these kinds of stories could find some value in the pages of The God of Lost Words. Additionally, given that it’s a book that shares elements with the fantasy genre, it could be something worth exploring for readers who enjoy fantasy books about creativity and the arts.
For writers, The God of Lost Words presents similar lessons to the previous two books, but still offers some insights that the other two don’t. The most prominent is how to use multiple character perspectives to drive forward a quest in a way that still feels like a compressed timeline; Hackwith provides an interesting template for how to do this by combining her use of the multiple points of view device and several other details that help convey urgency. Another major lesson that could potentially be drawn from the novel is a sense of reassurance that there are more ways to support the literary and artistic community than being a writer; every writer occasionally experiences doubt about their abilities and Hackwith’s novel offers a gentle reminder that the ecosystem of storytelling needs a variety of skills and assistance to survive long term, and writing is only one door one can walk through to achieve it.
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What’s Next?
I am an avid reader and have quite a few thoughts on how some books could benefit both people that want to be entertained and those looking to sharpen their literary skills.
If you’re interested in finding out more about what I’ve been reading – and how it could benefit you – I will be publishing those thoughts on a weekly basis. Check back next week for a discussion of Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On a Dead Man)!
The Writerly Review 