Book: The Invisible Library
- Author: Genevieve Cogman
- My Rating: 3 out of 5 Bookmarks
I’m part of an online book club, and this was our book for September. I was looking forward to this one because the heroine is a librarian, hello! I enjoyed it, but readers beware, because the author does a lot of world building. It takes a while to wrap your brain around it all. By “a while” I mean like 45% of the book – at least for me. Once I got through the exposition it became a page turner. So, dear reader, persevere!
This was a truly unique story, a library that exists between alternate universes, whose librarians enter these alternates to save and preserve (A.K.A. steal) important texts. Irene, a young librarian, and Kai, a librarian in training have been sent into an alternate to retrieve a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It sounds harmless, but this alternate has been corrupted by chaos, and several other factions are searching for the book, including the dangerous rogue librarian, Alberich. My biggest problem was that I couldn’t focus on this exciting story line, because I was spending too much energy trying to understand this steampunk, magic, science, parallel universe, rules of librarians stuff.
This is the first book in a series, so in theory, the rest of the books won’t spend so much time on exposition. I haven’t read them, so I can’t know for sure. Since I felt like I had the kitchen sink of exposition thrown at me for almost half the book, I had to give this one three out of five. But I will say, the librarians roasting each other on their bad grammar almost bumped this to four out of five bookmarks, y’all. Ultimately, I’m giving this one a “read it or don’t” recommendation.
Krystle Goodman is a crazy cat lady, who loves to drink exorbitant amounts of coffee, and read a shocking amount of books. She lives in Benton with her husband Josh, her son Roman, and their two cats Roxanne and Abby. When she isn’t reading, you’ll find her cooking, painting, or watching true crime shows. Watch for Krystle’s book reviews every other Friday. Send fanmail to: [email protected]
See more of Krystle’s reviews at www.mysaline.com/krystle.