If you’re a huge book nerd like me, or if you just like librarians the I can guarantee you will love the Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman. There are lots of things to love about this book and it’s preceding books. That being said, this is the third book in the series, and I feel that in order to really understand what’s happening in this book you need to read the first two. The characters are constantly making reference to events that happened previously, so it would be better to read the other two books so you can feel more connected to the characters and the plot.
I don’t want to give too much away about the plot, but here’s the basic premise: There is an interdimensional Library that links to every alternate Earth in existence. These worlds fall onto a spectrum of chaos and order. Most worlds fall around the middle but there are some worlds that are high-chaos where the Fae thrive, and worlds that are high order, where the Dragons thrive. Humans can exist in both chaos and order. Librarians are humans who live in the Library. They are sent out to each alternate world to collect rare and unique books to bring back for safe keeping in the Library. The main character, Irene, is a Librarian stationed on an alternate world similar to Sherlock Holmes’ London, with some interesting twists… vampires, werewolves, and dragons, oh my!
In this book, Irene and her assistant, Kai, are being sent out to various different alternate worlds on “crap” missions because they are being punished for some events that happened in the last book. Seriously, you should read it. If you love fantasy and science fiction this is the series for you! One minute they are in futuristic worlds, the next more fantasy based ones! Brilliant!
Alright, things I liked about this book are:
- Set in Victorian England in an alternate version of earth
- It has a steampunk-y vibe to it
- There is a Sherlock Holmes type character. I love Sherlock Holmes stories!
- There are dragons
- There are librarians
- The librarians are awesome secret agent for an awesome interdimensional Library.
- The whole concept of chaos and order is really well thought out
- Main character is someone I can relate to
There aren’t too many things I didn’t like about this book, but one of the main things is that there is suddenly a love triangle that I didn’t realize was there, or at least I don’t remember it being mentioned at all in the previous books. It seemed to pop out of nowhere. I knew there was some romantic tension between Irene and another character, but now this third character was thrown in. Seems like there was no build up to it at all.
The other thing I didn’t like about this book was that it ended. I just wanted to keep reading, and reading, and reading! The plot wraps up nicely, but there are so many more questions that are brought up throughout the book and I’m so curious about characters and their background stories now! Guess I’ll have to wait until December for answers. Heavy sigh.
I gave this book 5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads because it was awesome and I highly recommend this series to anyone who loves fantasy novels. The first book is called The Invisible Library, and the second book is called The Masked City. the fourth book is called The Lost Plot and is due to be published at the end of 2017.
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