55 pages • 1-hour read
The Book That Broke the World
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Chapters 1-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence and racism.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Celcha”
The Library Trilogy is set in Crath City and the surrounding desolate environment, called the Dust. Crath City is home to an extensive library, while the planet is home to several species, including humans, cranith (wolf-like creatures), and ganar (small, furry, intelligent beings). There are also insectoid species, called skeer and cratalacs.
This novel picks up where The Book That Wouldn’t Burn ends. The previous book’s protagonists, Evar and Livira, are both still in the library, but they are separated: Livira is a ghost, while Evar and his siblings are all trapped within different library rooms. In addition to following Livira and Evar’s storylines, The Book That Broke the World also follows two ganar, brother and sister Hellet and Celcha. The novel switches between two timelines: Hellet and Celcha’s story, represented by Celcha’s chapters, and a timeline set 200 years in the future, represented in Evar, Livira, and Arpix’s chapters.
In the present, Celcha and her younger brother Hellet are enslaved in a settlement on the Arthran Plateau. They are of a species called ganar, while their enslavers are another species called sabbers. The settlement is small, and the enslaved people who work the dig site live close together. Their job is to excavate rocks, metal, or plastic from a city buried underground, a world that Hellet says “had been squeezed dry long ago” (8).
The overseer of the settlement, Myles Carstar, is strict, and official cruelties are administered for various infractions. Once, Celcha was given five lashes and her younger brother Hellet was given 10 because he opened a book that Celcha excavated. Celcha fears that this cruelty broke her brother, who is unusual both for his large size and his ability to read. He sometimes speaks to Maybe, an invisible spirit he calls an “angel,” who Celcha can dimly see as a sparkle in the air.
The only feature outside the settlement’s wall is the head and shoulder of a statue of a long-ago queen. While excavating one day, Hellet breaks through a stone wall to expose a chamber filled with thousands of books, which he claims will be a means to an end.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Celcha”
Celcha thinks of the buried chamber as “thick with secrets they would never be allowed to know” (12). An older woman arrives from Crath City and identifies herself as a librarian. She is upset that the books are being brought to the surface with no regard for their organization. Celcha is surprised to see that the librarian has authority over Myles Carstar.
Hellet claims he can identify the books’ original placement, but he needs Celcha’s help. Celcha realizes Hellet is protecting her, but she is afraid he will get them both killed. A second “angel” called Starve arrives, and Hellet tells her that Starve is there to tell him how to kill their enslavers.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Evar”
Two hundred years in the future, Evar Eventari enters a new chamber of the library, different from the one where he lived his entire life, with his siblings Clovis and Kerrol. They are trying to help Evar find Livira, the woman he loves, who was trapped inside an assistant, one of the library’s immortal helpers. When the assistant’s body was destroyed by murderous insectoids called skeer, Livira’s spirit left it, and Evar doesn’t know where she is now. Evar’s other siblings, Starval and Mayland, go searching in a different direction.
Evar thinks about how often he tried to escape his particular chamber in the library and wonders, “How many people […] had spent their youth, their whole lives, battering at locked doors, only to find—if they ever managed to open them—that there was nothing on the other side they couldn’t have found on their own side?” (23). He also remembers the book Livira wrote, which she snuck into the library’s collection.
Evar and his siblings walk through the chamber, trying to avoid skeer, and Evar climbs a shelf to survey the terrain. He awakens a large mechanical monster, called an Escape. It is made of metal and fur, and it wears a manacle around its wrist. It begins to pursue Evar.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Celcha”
In the present, the librarian takes Hellet and Celcha to work for her in the library. They leave the settlement, walking behind the wagons that carry the books from the buried chamber. Celcha brings several dozen nootki, the wooden figures that her people carve to represent their spirits. Each one represents the spirit of a ganar who died, and the fact that the community entrusted them to her is significant. Celcha surveys the compound as they leave, observing “how very small it all was and how awful that so many lives were eaten up there, ground into nothing for the greed of others” (28).
Celcha is surprised at how large the outer world is. All she knows of Crath City is that two species of “sabber,” the ganar term for others, live there. The two species have a long history of warfare but now seem to live together in truce. Inside the city gates, Hellet shares what he has learned from the books about their environment. He describes the canith, who are larger and stronger than humans and have wolf-like qualities, but he reminds Celcha that intelligence matters more than physical strength. He reminds Celcha that while ganar are slow to anger, they are fierce.
The city is immense and grand, and Celcha is surprised when a streetlight turns on. The lights and stoves are powered by gas. They stop at the library’s entrance, signified by the image of a wolf carved into the mountainside. Librarians, both human and canith, come to retrieve the books. Another creature arrives, as white and smooth as stone. The others call him an assistant, and he asks Hellet and Celcha’s names. Hellet’s angel Maybe, who now resembles a canith, tells Celcha that the assistant’s name is Yute, and he is a deputy librarian.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Celcha”
The librarian, Sellna, explains the siblings’ new duties and that they will be living with other trainees. Certain library doors will only open for members of particular species, and the library needs a new pair of ganar to open the related doors. The siblings are given a room, food, and Celcha is taught to read. She learns the history of their species: The ganar originally came from a moon called Attamast. It has a different atmosphere and different rotation than this planet.
Celcha notices that some of the other trainees seem to think of her as a pet and will stroke her fur without asking. Lutna, a girl of 11, tries to befriend Celcha, who rejects her, thinking of the others as “pieces in the machine that had devoured her” (41).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Evar”
Two hundred years in the future, Evar flees the mechanical beast, which destroys library shelves in its efforts to reach him. He and his siblings climb to the top of the shelves and traverse the room that way. Clovis is not able to open the door to the next chamber, but one of the skeer attacking the construct is. Evar instructs his siblings to leave him, as the monster seems focused on him.
Suddenly, an assistant appears in one of the doorways. The assistant sends the mechanical beast and the skeer away and then tells Evar not to speak to ghosts.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Livira”
Livira Page, Evar’s former girlfriend, is in ghost form with her soldier companion Malar. They follow Evar as he flees the monster construct, but Livira senses that the thing was actually chasing her. When an assistant appears, Livira asks him to tell Evar of her presence, but the assistant tells Evar not to speak to ghosts. The assistant tells Livira that the book she wrote has “written a wound into the world, broken ageless laws” (53). He says the book is a loop spreading cracks through time.
Livira recalls how her book became fused with an earlier version that she brought forward in time. She wonders if she broke the Mechanism, the portal through which one can travel into a book, and is responsible for the Escapes (the mechanical beasts). The assistant says if she can retrieve her book and bring it back to Evar’s time, she can regain her flesh and leave her ghost form behind. The assistant creates a portal for her and Malar.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Celcha”
In the present, Celcha and Hellet are taken on an expedition to open a library chamber that belongs to the ganar. As the assorted group enters the chamber after Celcha, she thinks briefly that even though they aren’t personally responsible for her enslavement, “They were part of the system. Part of the machine” (58).
The ganar chamber offers several passageways and hundreds of rooms. It is believed to have been a place of exchange, and Hellet notes that the library occasionally shuffles rooms. Another librarian explains that the space suffered from a long-ago fire, and the books there are valuable.
As they wander the chamber, Celcha spots a raven, and Hellet locates two books. He gives one to Lutna and keeps one. Celcha guesses that Maybe, who she and Hellet now understand is a ghost, led him to the books. The group panics when they cannot open the door of the chamber.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Celcha”
An assistant opens the doorway and takes Celcha and Hellet aside. He says he can see eternity and has watched several civilizations rise and fall around the library. This current city is the first one where canith and human have been able to coexist. Hellet points out that this city was built on the backs of enslaved people. The assistant says that Celcha and Hellet are cracks in the flow of time, creating turbulence. The assistant, named Yute, suggests that they can serve the library by becoming assistants themselves.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Evar”
Two hundred years later, Evar leads Clovis and Kerrol through the library until they reach an outer chamber. They exit into a sequence of caves and built rooms that seem deserted and crumbling. At last, they reach the outside world and emerge on the side of a mountain.
As they walk across a broad plain, Evar reflects on the last time he saw his brother Mayland, when Mayland killed an assistant who chose to become human. His other brother Starval also killed a human, and the two of them had plans to destroy the library.
Suddenly, the three come upon a skeer nest, and they run.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Arpix”
Arpix was a librarian before he fled the library, and he reflects on the upheaval that Livira brought into his life when she became a trainee at the library. When the library burned, Arpix and his companions went through a portal and emerged in the Dust, where they have been living for four years, growing jarra beans and exploring the buried city.
They see strangers approaching their encampment, running from skeer, and Arpix’s companions—Jost, Jella, Meelan, and Salamonda—decide to light a fire to guide the strangers to safety. They recognize that the approaching three are canith, and when the smallest of them turns to fight the skeer with her sword, Arpix is impressed.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Evar”
Evar fears he and his siblings won’t reach the encampment’s fire before the skeer get to them, and Kerrol and Clovis are injured along the way. The humans around the fire don’t run away as the skeer approach, and Evar realizes there is some sort of protection around them, a boundary the skeer cannot cross.
When they enter the encampment, he recognizes Arpix as a friend of Livira’s from the library. Clovis demands to know what weapon they are using to protect themselves. They discover that Arpix can speak their language.
Chapters 1-12 Analysis
These chapters introduce the four point-of-view characters who will take turns narrating the story: Celcha, Evar, Livira, and Arpix. All the points of view are close third-person point of view, meaning that the narrative offers insight into their thoughts and feelings. Each of the narrators experience similar movements of displacement and rupture in this opening act, setting up their individual journeys. Each character’s plotline also comments in some way on the novel’s deeper themes concerning the uses of knowledge and power, the roots of the conflict among the different species introduced, and the need for connection and community.
Celcha’s arc occupies the bulk of these first chapters. She and Hellet are new characters to the series, and although it isn’t clear in these chapters that she and her brother aren’t in the same time period as the other narratives, that revelation will slowly unfold. Similar to Evar, who spent his life trapped in one chamber of the library, Celcha’s life has been kept narrow and constrained by her enslavement. Her and Hellet’s difference in species and in physical appearance to their enslavers are used to justify their enslavement. The cruelties with which resistance and disobedience are punished demonstrate the harsh grounds upon which this society is built. Hellet’s extreme punishment for opening a book suggests that his enslavers fear what he might do if allowed to exercise his natural curiosity, intelligence, and physical strength. Physical violence, prohibitions on knowledge, and restricted movement or awareness of the outside world are how the enslavers retain their power, but their actions are also shaping Hellet’s character, introducing the idea of the perpetuating cycles of violence.
The suggestion that knowledge could offer liberation is borne out when the discovery of the buried library leads Hellet and Celcha to the new library in the city, where their living conditions improve. Still, this transfer does not constitute real freedom for either character; both in terms of library staff and in the city’s social order, ganar are still in the bottom class, used as servants and enslaved. While the human princess, Lutna, attempts to build a friendship with Celcha, suggesting The Healing Power of Peace and Alliance, Lawrence shows that the animosity and resentment Celcha harbors from her lifetime of subjugation runs too deep to be placated by superficial kindness. She still views the system as a machine that uses her people as fuel, a machine as heartless and destructive as the as-yet-unidentified machine chasing Evar.
Hints at Hellet’s impending attack on this system begin with his vow to murder his enslavers, hinting at The Costs of the Ongoing Cycle of Violence, while the assistant’s image of the two ganar as turbulence in the flow of time foreshadows the action to follow. Hellet’s choice to keep one of the books he located, on Maybe’s advice, suggests that he understands the power of the knowledge he is able to acquire by existing inside the library, and he is exploiting the system for his own ends.
While the city of Crath has a class hierarchy based on status and species, this version of the civilization is remarkable in its history for the tenuous coexistence between canith and humans. A similar inclusiveness prevails in the library but for practical reasons. The fact that species must work together to grant one another access suggests the ideal vision of the library is as a collaborative, shared space. However, the existence of the destructive automata, as well as the history of past fires in the ganar chambers, suggests that the library and its knowledge have long been a site of conflict that subverts these originals aims. The assistant, Yute, advocates for the ideal of a peaceful, inclusive space when he suggests that Hellet and Celcha need to repair the threat they pose. But the possibility that this threat is linked to their species, which this society ranks as inferior, introduces a moral ambiguity that makes Hellet and Celcha resist this choice. This is one of many incidents in the book where a character acts on incomplete knowledge or understanding of a situation, with serious consequences, highlighting The Dangers of Incomplete Knowledge.
Evar’s many pursuits and retreats are a different sort of opening to knowledge as he, too, gains a more practical understanding of the outside world, which he is finally able to access. His scenes of pursuit add conflict but also introduce the question of motives for persecution, as it isn’t clear why the mechanical construct and the skeer are pursuing him, other than for purposes of mere destruction. This hints that aggression might be in some way fundamental to the way that certain species interact, a theme that will gain weight and emphasis as events unfold.
Livira’s quest to retrieve the book she wrote offers another perspective of the pursuit of knowledge. The damage her book is doing offers a metaphor for the impacts of knowledge, as Livira’s book is composed of various fictions that impact whoever it comes in contact with. Livira represents the creative power of the author but she also illustrates the lack of control that an author has over dissemination and interpretation of her works. A vein of literary theory called reader response theory argues that authors are only co-creators of texts, and the interpretation the reader contributes is fundamental to the meaning as a whole. The extent of a creator’s control over her creation is another idea the novel will examine from different angles.
The assistants present as characters, metaphor, and mystery in these chapters. They offer the paradox of objective and eternal knowledge balanced with human curiosity. In some scenes they behave as deus ex machina, coordinating events, shaping conflict, and impacting character arcs, but they also introduce suspense around their ultimate role.
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