I love books, which really isn’t much of a surprise coming from
someone who has a blog about books. So, it’s not much of a stretch for me to
love libraries too – after all, they are huge collections of books, and I do
have my daydreams of one day having a perfectly snobbish private library for all
of my books, but I digress.
So…fantasy stories about libraries…I’m rather predisposed to
liking them. The Invisible Library by
Genevieve Cogman is just that, a fantasy adventure centered on a great library
where librarians have magical powers that they use to cross between worlds to
collect books. Yes, there’s a greater struggle across all the worlds between
order and chaos, full of fantastical beings that fall on various ends of that
spectrum – chaotic fae, orderly dragons, etc. But it all comes back to magical
librarian doesn’t it?
The story is pretty basic…a mid-level librarian is assigned a new
apprentice and a new task that should be pretty straight-forward. Collect a
book in a mildly chaotic world and bring it back. Of course it turns out to be
more complicated, of greater importance and way more dangerous than
anticipated. There are mixed loyalties, betrayals, mysterious origins and all
that jazz. Even a nice hum of romantic tension is thrown about as it mingles
with Victorian-style propriety and modern ideas of sexual freedom.
This is Cogman’s debut book, and it sometimes reads as such with a
bit too much exposition and pacing difficulties. But then I can forgive pacing
issues when librarians are the stars – how many librarians have you known have
a tendency to go off on a tangent right in the middle of the search for that
precious book?
I quite enjoyed The
Invisible Library and heartily recommend it for a bit of bookishly fun
diversion. I haven’t yet made it to the sequels, though the beckon from the
shelves of my want-to-be library.
The Invisible Library: Amazon
The Masked City: Amazon
The Burning Page: Amazon
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