INK, IRON, AND GLASS – Gwendolyn Clare

Elsa is a scriptologist. With a specific pen and a certain notebook, a scriptologist can create new worlds and expand on existing worlds. But those worlds exist between the covers of the notebooks and when some of the books are damaged, it could mean the destruction of the worlds.

Elsa comes from a scripted world – a world that her mother, a respected scriptologist herself, is constantly writing and expanding. But when Elsa’s mother is kidnapped and the very existence of her world is threatened, Elsa realizes that she will have to call on her own talents, cross into the ‘real’ world, and find some friends to help save her world.

I absolutely loved this concept. Author Gwendolyn Clare drops us into this wondrous world right off the bat and we are quickly introduced to magic of scriptology and the dangers inherent in a world made from paper and ink. The development of the dangers proceeds nicely and this story is very well told.

The problem I had was with the characters.

Elsa, as the main protagonist, has some depth to her, but she’s pretty innocent and relatively gullible, but part of this might be to appeal to a specific YA audience, and I hope we’ll some growth in this area as the series develops.

The rest of the characters in the book are mostly dull figures used to move the plot forward but don’t come off as very real. Leo, Elsa’s love interest, is about as two-dimensional as the words on a sciptologist’s page. And because he’s flat, the romance that is suggested seems more a distraction from the story than an interesting plot or character development.

I started off liking this a lot but the further in I got the more ambivalent I became toward the story, because of the characters.

Looking for a good book? Ink, Iron, and Glass by Gwendolyn Clare is a YA fantasy with a great, clever premise, but the characters don’t live up to the world created for them.