The God of Lost Words is the third and final book of the Hell’s Library trilogy. If you have not read The Library of the Unwritten (book one) and The Archive of the Forgotten (book two) yet and plan on reading them, then do not read any further as this review will contain some spoilers for the first two books.

In The Archive of the Forgotten,we learn that the books in the Unwritten Wing of the Library, and all the stories in all the wings of the Library, are really souls. Claire, Hero, Rami and Brevity keep this information to themselves while they figure out what to do with it. Meanwhile, the various wings of the libraries do not actually belong to the realms that host them, so Hell, led by one of its generals, Malphas (who seems to know about books=souls), wants to take over the Unwritten Wing and all the other wings of the Library. Claire wants to pick up where a previous librarian of the Unwritten Wing left off and figure out how to make the Library its own place not beholden to any of the realms (a heaven unto itself, if you will, which sounds amazing to me. As long as there are also cats.). Claire, Hero, Rami and Brevity work together to figure out why the previous librarian failed and what they need to do to make this happen. They learn that they will need a realm, a guide, a people, and a god.

Hero, because he “read” all the books in the Dust Wing and therefore all stories trust him, is tasked with gathering the “people” aka the stories/souls from the different wings of the Library. This leads to twelve wings squishing themselves into the Unwritten Wing, along with the other, rather unfriendly, librarians. Unfortunately, we do not get to learn anything about the other wings of the Library besides the ones we are introduced to in the other two books; same with the other librarians. I will not speculate on why Hackwith did this; it is too bad, though, because the concept of the Library is the most interesting part of these books.

I am both satisfied and dissatisfied with The God of Lost Words. Satisfied because the characters really shine, particularly in the last two books of this trilogy, and I am content with the place each of them ends up in by the end of this book. One fate in particular is quite obvious, but this is tempered by the return of a character from book one which I was pleased to read. Dissatisfied not only because of the lack of expansion on the Library concept, but because it feels like this book was gearing up to a big battle with Malphas, then…nothing much happens. This really is a character driven book rather than a plot driven book, which I do not always think is a problem, but in this case, I feel it was misleading.

Now that I have finished reading the Hell’s Library trilogy, I am looking back at it and feeling kind of…meh. It ended up sounding more interesting than it actually reads, which is too bad because there is a lot of potential in the Library that should have been explored. However, these books have made me reflect upon the importance of stories to humans as our society moves towards secularization and because of our obsession with social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok are all platforms that allow us to share our stories with the world; we are not limited to just the printed word anymore.