There’s a Lot Going on Here.

I think if I tried to fully explain the plot of The Invisible Library, we’d be here all day. This book has a LOT going on. Let me see if I can just skim the surface.

Irene is a Librarian at a special Library that exists outside of space and time. Her job is to visit different worlds and collect books for the Library. Original printings, special books that only exist in one universe instead of in all of them, stuff like that. She’s sent out on a mission with a trainee, Kai, to retrieve a special version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales from a sort of steampunk world full of vampires, zeppelins, fae, and mechanical monsters. The retrieval, of course, does not go as planned and Irene and Kai find themselves caught up in a dangerous mission.

I could go into all the enemies they encounter, but suffice it to say there’s a lot. This book is jam-packed with information, bad guys, a thousand details–Genevieve Cogman clearly had a whole world in mind when she sat down to write this. And it’s not bad, exactly–I finished it pretty quickly and enjoyed the ride–but at times it’s a little hard to follow, and since this is the first in a series, there’s an awful lot of world-building that doesn’t really get wrapped up with the end of the book. I don’t know if I’ll read the second–I just went to Amazon and read the summary and it did sound intriguing, but this book was a bit of a letdown. It has a lot in common with some of my favorite series (the All Souls trilogy and the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy), but it just didn’t quite get there. It had a bit in common with The Dark Days Club, but I liked that better than this too. As I’ve said before about far, far too many books, it didn’t suck, but neither did it rock.