4.5 stars

this is such a cool world and story!! the world building here is intensely complex and so interesting, i love how meta it gets. it's a wonderful little homage to the art of storytelling and the writing is beautiful and lyrical, with the occasional dip into purple prose (but it fits the theme of the book).
i really enjoyed the arc of all these characters, i loved how self-aware they were about playing into the archetypes of their characters, but i had trouble connecting with them emotionally. i had to get pretty far into the book before i started to get invested in the characters themselves, and even then it was more about intrigue than them tugging on my heart strings. the character development is very much there tho, and i will still probably read the next book, but i'm way more invested in the world building of this series than the characters. if the idea of magical libraries, war between heaven/hell and angel/demon, and navigating different afterlives through the power of storytelling sounds interesting, this book might be for you.