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Library of the Unwritten spoiler edition
Okay, this is the post with All The Spoilers, at least for two of my favorite twists in the book. I strongly recommend that if you like being unspoiled and especially if you like to be unspoiled for character twists or characters turning out to be more than they seem, you shouldn't read this post until after reading the book. In one case in particular I had terrific fun figuring it out for myself and then being proved right.
I don't think either of these are the sort of thing I would consider a big deciding factor in whether to read the book; they don't drastically change the basic premise or anything like that. They're just neat.
(I should note that these are definitely not the only character reveals in the book; nearly everyone is hiding something, I think. But these were the ones that really got me where I lived.)
Thing 1: Claire is a murderer + Claire is wrong about the Library and the books.
I loved this because Claire is our entry character and therefore, in narrative subtext, we're primed to think of this character as the one who (unless telegraphed otherwise) is our most objective source of truth on the world. This is doubly so because Claire is introduced as a stern, sensible, badass Battle Librarian who seems like the most level-headed person around.
But Claire is actually a miserable, damaged person who is ruthlessly concealing the greatest trauma of her afterlife (falling in love with her own book character and murdering her mentor to save her book-lover's life) and to rationalize her own actions and try to prevent anyone else from falling into the same trap, has become brutally pragmatic about the books, refusing to acknowledge that they have any potential personhood at all. We are introduced to Claire when she stabs a book character (an innocent victim running away from a horror book) to get her to go back into her book, over the protests of her horrified, softhearted assistant Brevity. The reader's general assumption in that scene is that Brevity, the new girl, is being a little overly sympathetic to the books, and Claire's coolheaded, coolhearted version of the Library's metaphysics is accurate, or at the very least that Claire is mostly right.
In fact, Claire is mostly wrong, and Claire's major journey as a protagonist is in learning that she has not only been wrong about the books, she has in fact been incredibly cruel to the books, and every character who tells her that she needs to give the books more nurturing to develop their stories, more support, more freedom is actually -- perhaps not entirely right, but at least mostly right.
Claire is reacting based on her own trauma, trauma which resulted not from being a victim but being the perpetrator - she murdered an innocent person, and her book ran off and left her. And everything she's done since then has been a desperate attempt to make things right that has actually made things even more wrong. Claire is a brave, strong-willed, often admirable person who also experiences the flip side of this, that she is capable of directing her courage and will into doing terrible things, and she has been doing that, so as well as being there to pull off the final act of rescue at the end of the book, she also must change herself -- as well as dealing with the fact that her Library, for good reason, hates her, even if not all the individual books do.
And it also did things to me that a large part of her pivot had to do with Hero -- arrogant, obnoxious, someone she spends a lot of the book actively disliking, but she can't deny (at least not for too long) that he's a person, not merely a book character but an individual capable of growth and change. Which leads to ...
Thing 2: Hero is the villain (of his book).
I am still delighted with myself for figuring this out early on and I also think it's hilarious what actually tipped me off.
So Claire & co. go to Earth to retrieve an escaped book character and then are stuck with him, with all Hell (literally) breaking loose around them, because he has changed so much already that they can't get his book to take him back (the problem with book characters running around loose - they evolve). In another example of Claire's protagonist-centered viewpoint often being wrong, she informs Brevity et al that he is the hero of the book he escaped from and nobody ever really questions that - he even decides to dub himself Hero, to Claire's disgust - but Claire is actually just guessing, because she's in a hurry and he looks like a hero and escaped book characters commonly are the hero, so she never actually checks. In fact, he is the antagonist, and as his book's villain he naturally rolls with everyone assuming he's the hero of the book because why wouldn't he?! He's not just going to flat out tell them he's the villain; they wouldn't trust him at all! Also, a lot of his traits - arrogance, quippiness, etc - read to Claire like typical hero traits in part because she has a general chip on her shoulder about book heroes, so she fails to see that he's not entirely acting the hero part as he should be.
But because he is no longer a static character in an unwritten book, but an actual person capable of changing, the more people around him treat him like a hero, the more he figures out how to be one.
I figured this out long before the characters did not just because he's not the right archetype to actually be the stock fantasy hero they think he is (he's sarcastic, cynical, and, at least early on, usually does hero-type stuff only when he doesn't really have a choice) but also because I found myself reacting to him exactly as I typically do to redeemable villain types. In the characters' defense there is a lot going on and he has a perfectly valid reason for being sarcastic and hard to get along with, which is that he's been separated from his book, has no idea what's going on, and is basically enslaved to the library due to the librarians holding his library catalog card and book stamp, which gives them the magical ability to retrieve him from wherever he goes. It's just that it takes them a while to catch on that he's not a sullen, snarky, sidelined hero being a brat about his massive stepdown in privilege; he's a villain who is actually doing an increasingly convincing hero impression.
.... this is probably just my one-track mind, but at times he reminded me a lot of Zemo in TFATWS. I think this is not just because of the "morally gray antagonist among the heroes" thing that he has going on, but also because the general vibe is a lot friendlier than you'd expect; he hedges a lot early on, but by the midpoint or so he has clearly thrown his lot in with them and has started doing things like instinctively throwing himself in front of Claire in a fight.
Also, best exchange:
(Claire) "You have to trust me."
(Hero) "Why start now?"
(Claire) "Because it's what humans do."
MY HEART. ♥
It's also really interesting, knowing all of this, to go back and look at the early Hero scenes, and the early Claire scenes, and the way they're both sidestepping certain topics without quite being obvious about it. In particular, Hero, as he says later, never actually lies to them; he just ducks the topic whenever any specifics about his role in his book come up. Such as his actual name.
I don't think either of these are the sort of thing I would consider a big deciding factor in whether to read the book; they don't drastically change the basic premise or anything like that. They're just neat.
(I should note that these are definitely not the only character reveals in the book; nearly everyone is hiding something, I think. But these were the ones that really got me where I lived.)
Thing 1: Claire is a murderer + Claire is wrong about the Library and the books.
I loved this because Claire is our entry character and therefore, in narrative subtext, we're primed to think of this character as the one who (unless telegraphed otherwise) is our most objective source of truth on the world. This is doubly so because Claire is introduced as a stern, sensible, badass Battle Librarian who seems like the most level-headed person around.
But Claire is actually a miserable, damaged person who is ruthlessly concealing the greatest trauma of her afterlife (falling in love with her own book character and murdering her mentor to save her book-lover's life) and to rationalize her own actions and try to prevent anyone else from falling into the same trap, has become brutally pragmatic about the books, refusing to acknowledge that they have any potential personhood at all. We are introduced to Claire when she stabs a book character (an innocent victim running away from a horror book) to get her to go back into her book, over the protests of her horrified, softhearted assistant Brevity. The reader's general assumption in that scene is that Brevity, the new girl, is being a little overly sympathetic to the books, and Claire's coolheaded, coolhearted version of the Library's metaphysics is accurate, or at the very least that Claire is mostly right.
In fact, Claire is mostly wrong, and Claire's major journey as a protagonist is in learning that she has not only been wrong about the books, she has in fact been incredibly cruel to the books, and every character who tells her that she needs to give the books more nurturing to develop their stories, more support, more freedom is actually -- perhaps not entirely right, but at least mostly right.
Claire is reacting based on her own trauma, trauma which resulted not from being a victim but being the perpetrator - she murdered an innocent person, and her book ran off and left her. And everything she's done since then has been a desperate attempt to make things right that has actually made things even more wrong. Claire is a brave, strong-willed, often admirable person who also experiences the flip side of this, that she is capable of directing her courage and will into doing terrible things, and she has been doing that, so as well as being there to pull off the final act of rescue at the end of the book, she also must change herself -- as well as dealing with the fact that her Library, for good reason, hates her, even if not all the individual books do.
And it also did things to me that a large part of her pivot had to do with Hero -- arrogant, obnoxious, someone she spends a lot of the book actively disliking, but she can't deny (at least not for too long) that he's a person, not merely a book character but an individual capable of growth and change. Which leads to ...
Thing 2: Hero is the villain (of his book).
I am still delighted with myself for figuring this out early on and I also think it's hilarious what actually tipped me off.
So Claire & co. go to Earth to retrieve an escaped book character and then are stuck with him, with all Hell (literally) breaking loose around them, because he has changed so much already that they can't get his book to take him back (the problem with book characters running around loose - they evolve). In another example of Claire's protagonist-centered viewpoint often being wrong, she informs Brevity et al that he is the hero of the book he escaped from and nobody ever really questions that - he even decides to dub himself Hero, to Claire's disgust - but Claire is actually just guessing, because she's in a hurry and he looks like a hero and escaped book characters commonly are the hero, so she never actually checks. In fact, he is the antagonist, and as his book's villain he naturally rolls with everyone assuming he's the hero of the book because why wouldn't he?! He's not just going to flat out tell them he's the villain; they wouldn't trust him at all! Also, a lot of his traits - arrogance, quippiness, etc - read to Claire like typical hero traits in part because she has a general chip on her shoulder about book heroes, so she fails to see that he's not entirely acting the hero part as he should be.
But because he is no longer a static character in an unwritten book, but an actual person capable of changing, the more people around him treat him like a hero, the more he figures out how to be one.
I figured this out long before the characters did not just because he's not the right archetype to actually be the stock fantasy hero they think he is (he's sarcastic, cynical, and, at least early on, usually does hero-type stuff only when he doesn't really have a choice) but also because I found myself reacting to him exactly as I typically do to redeemable villain types. In the characters' defense there is a lot going on and he has a perfectly valid reason for being sarcastic and hard to get along with, which is that he's been separated from his book, has no idea what's going on, and is basically enslaved to the library due to the librarians holding his library catalog card and book stamp, which gives them the magical ability to retrieve him from wherever he goes. It's just that it takes them a while to catch on that he's not a sullen, snarky, sidelined hero being a brat about his massive stepdown in privilege; he's a villain who is actually doing an increasingly convincing hero impression.
.... this is probably just my one-track mind, but at times he reminded me a lot of Zemo in TFATWS. I think this is not just because of the "morally gray antagonist among the heroes" thing that he has going on, but also because the general vibe is a lot friendlier than you'd expect; he hedges a lot early on, but by the midpoint or so he has clearly thrown his lot in with them and has started doing things like instinctively throwing himself in front of Claire in a fight.
Also, best exchange:
(Claire) "You have to trust me."
(Hero) "Why start now?"
(Claire) "Because it's what humans do."
MY HEART. ♥
It's also really interesting, knowing all of this, to go back and look at the early Hero scenes, and the early Claire scenes, and the way they're both sidestepping certain topics without quite being obvious about it. In particular, Hero, as he says later, never actually lies to them; he just ducks the topic whenever any specifics about his role in his book come up. Such as his actual name.
no subject
I really liked all the Claire & Hero stuff!! (As per of course I did XD )