Not every book will be right for you, and The Library at Mount Char definitely wasn't right for me. It started quite well and I was intrigued by the set-up. I loved that it didn't tell us what was going on or who anybody was. It really set me up for something action-packed and thrilling. Instead, it gave me a very slow burner that went all over the place with seemingly little direction. It definitely felt like the writer had no idea what would happen. It had the feel of unrelated scenes that were vaguely combined to create something of a narrative. Its lack of coherence makes it a difficult book to read. I couldn't get carried away by the story because the story was so fragmented and unrelated. It wasn't that everything was happening because it was organic but because certain people needed to end up in certain situations.

So, it's difficult to sum up this story. You either give everything away or be incredibly vague about everything. Basically, we get introduced to Carolyn just after her "Father" has gone missing. Although, he wasn't her biological father but the man who raised her along with a group of other orphans. He trained them all at the library, a mysterious place that housed all the knowledge in the universe and beyond. Each child is given a subject and forced to spend their days becoming experts. He wasn't the nicest of men but his disappearance is dangerous. With his enemies coming out of the woodwork, Carolyn and her siblings must do some stuff for some undefined reasons. Really, there's just a lot of waiting. Oh, and the sun disappears at some point, there are some lions and a couple of random men get caught up in it. It's a lot.

I'm not a believer that you need to like a character to enjoy a book. I am a believer that you need to care about them. You barely get to know anything about these characters, so I didn't care what happened to any of them. They didn't feel like real, well-rounded people and there was something off about the dialogue. I know some of them are supposed to be otherworldly but the humans sounded just as unrealistic at times. There's one person whose character is "army guy" and that's supposed to be everything we need to know to consider him a great person. If there had been less story to connect, there might have been more time to spend on character development. In the end, I only really cared about the lions. Give me a whole book about them and I'd probably have read it way quicker than this one. Everyone else? I barely remember them.

It's not that there aren't positives here and there are certainly interesting ideas. It's just that it was trying to do so much and it never came together. It's been inspired by so many things that it becomes a jumble. There were basically no rules to this universe apart from "is it needed to drive the plot forward?" Even then, it doesn't always need to drive the plot forward. There's a moment towards the end that makes no sense apart from a bit of drama. It made no sense for the character to act that way or consider it an effective thing to do. This is a book that's trying to be a clever and original epic but it's maybe too ambitious for its own good. It's weird, which I don't have a problem with. The thing I couldn't get on board with was how directionless it felt. If a plot is going to meander all over the place then you need to feel confident that the writer knows where we're going to end. I had zero confidence when reading this.

This book also seems to be labelled as a horror book, which I find off. I assume that, in this case, horror just means "gratuitous violence that didn't really add anything". That's what this book is. I don't mind the amount of violence in this book but I would have preferred that it was for a reason. Instead, it just seemed like it was there for shock value. Rather than being interested in writing an engaging and entertaining book, The Library at Mount Char felt more like a literary experiment that didn't go exactly as planned. Later on, we learn that one of the characters has set the whole plot up as a random but planned event. This felt like a convenient way of saying "this is why nothing makes sense". We then learn than another character knew it was all going to happen, which feels like a desperate plea of "but it honestly does make sense". Personally, I'm not buying it. This was a long and arduous read for me. Is the writing worth 2 stars? Probably not, but I wasted three weeks trying to finish this and it wasn't worth it.