I enjoyed reading The Library of the Unwritten, but do I think it is an amazing book that would I recommend over a lot of the other books I have read recently? No. The concept is interesting, but the characters are not original enough to make this novel really stand out. I am not saying that you would be wasting your time reading this novel, but I would not blame you if you had something else you are really excited to read instead.

The Library of the Unwritten is about heaven and hell, angels and demons, and unwritten books and their characters. Hell has a library, and in this library there is a wing full of unwritten books. The unwritten books are unfinished stories that never made it out of the author’s imagination and into the public sphere (through oral storytelling or publication, etc.). Why would there be a library, in Hell of all places, with these unwritten books? Because demons like to feed off human imagination. It seems like a flimsy pretext to me, but I am just going to go with it because I find the idea of unwritten books intriguing, especially when the characters in these books escape and go looking for their authors on Earth.

The librarian of the Unwritten Wing, Claire, is on the hunt for one of these escaped characters when the action in the novel kicks off. While on Earth retrieving the errant character, she and her new assistant Leto, a demon that is new to Hell, have a run in with an angel named Ramiel. Ramiel has a single page from the Devil’s Bible that he got from a human soul waiting to get into Heaven, and he thinks Claire has access to the rest of the Devil’s Bible in Hell’s library. Leto manages to steal the page from Ramiel before he and Claire are transported back to Hell.

Claire has no idea what the Devil’s Bible is, and the librarian of the Arcane Wing in Hell’s library, a demon named Andras, explains to her that the Devil’s Bible was a book that Lucifer used to store some of his power (think Voldemort and his horcruxes) but the book was destroyed long ago, although rumour had it that some of the pages were removed and hidden on Earth. This leads to a quest by Claire, Leto, Andras and co. to find the missing pages before the angels do, otherwise if the angels get to the pages first, there will be a war between Heaven and Hell, and Earth will be caught in the crossfire (Sidebar: why are angels always depicted as assholes in popular culture? If you have seen Supernatural or Lucifer, you know what I am talking about. It does not make one feel very inclined to go to Heaven if they despise humans so much).

Now this all sounds very intriguing, but the characters are all so cliched, that it is quite easy to predict what will happen in this novel. Friends are actually foes; apathetic characters are actually heroes; and the plucky characters that care will of course save the day and save the Unwritten Wing. But why does the Unwritten Wing matter so much? How did it come into existence? And why does it have to exist in Hell? I feel that this novel should have spent some more time exploring the idea of unwritten books, the escaped characters and their authors, because if humans do not know the Unwritten Wing even exists and the only beings that care about its existence are demons, then who cares what happens to it? Hopefully, the Unwritten Wing is explored further in the next books in the Hell’s Library series, and hopefully the concepts of heaven and hell, angels and demons, and the absent God are also explored further in the next books because all I got from this series so far is that angels are dicks (and I already knew that).