I'm a sucker for books featuring librarians and library settings. Sometimes it's successful, sometimes not so much. Luckily, The Archived is one of those examples where it works well. Schwab imagines the afterlife as a library (the Archive), where copies of dead people (Histories) are stored, sleeping in drawers, tended by Librarians capable of reading the Histories' memories. The Archive is connected to the world of the living (the Outer) by a shadowy limbo made out of corridors, called the Narrows. It is the job of Keepers, like protagonist Mackenzie, to patrol the Narrows and return Histories that have woken up back to the Archive where they belong.

I really enjoyed this book. It starts as a slow burn, and it was fun to build on my knowledge of the Archive as the book progressed. Although the pace felt slow in the first half, I was happy that I stuck with this one because the second half takes off and was difficult to put down. Recently I've read a few so-so books, and it felt so good to get wrapped up in Mackenzie's story and to find myself thinking about it when I wasn't reading the book. It even made me want to start writing again.

Hopefully the sequel lives up to this one.