Here’s the blurb in case you’re interested:
One thing any Librarian will tell you: the truth is much stranger than fiction…
Irene is a professional spy for the mysterious Library, a shadowy organization that collects important works of fiction from all of the different realities. Most recently, she and her enigmatic assistant Kai have been sent to an alternative London. Their mission: Retrieve a particularly dangerous book. The problem: By the time they arrive, it’s already been stolen.
London’s underground factions are prepared to fight to the death to find the tome before Irene and Kai do, a problem compounded by the fact that this world is chaos-infested—the laws of nature bent to allow supernatural creatures and unpredictable magic to run rampant. To make matters worse, Kai is hiding something—secrets that could be just as volatile as the chaos-filled world itself.
Now Irene is caught in a puzzling web of deadly danger, conflicting clues, and sinister secret societies. And failure is not an option—because it isn’t just Irene’s reputation at stake, it’s the nature of reality itself…
Here’s my live thoughts while reading:
“The Invisible Library” starts out with Irene, disguised as a cleaning servant at a boys school, stealing an important manuscript for the Library. The writing has a lot of telling and despite the action of attacking gargoyles, I was a little bored, so let’s see how the rest goes.
I love the concept of The ‘Language.’ Overall I’m a little confused about the world building. There are alternate worlds, but how exactly? Russia and London have already been mentioned so where do these characters live?
Why did Irene’s supervisor dump an inexperienced intern on her without warning? Why does he know more about the case than Irene does? Why is it urgent?
The Library in itself may be a conspiracy? Apparently Irene might live for centuries? But it’s not explained well enough. Just bits and pieces so far which is a little confusing. It sounds like they’re only supposed to “take” those to work at the Library who don’t have close living relatives, but that may be a cover?
Alrighty so I don’t feel grounded. I can’t picture where they are or what’s around them. Apparently the world they’re going to has chaos infestation, which means mythical creatures are roaming without rules or regulations. And technology is involved so is this sci fi? They need to retrieve a rare book on this dangerous mission but the world building is confusing and their emotions and dialogue are overall flat.
So Irene has a colleague enemy who will make matters worse somehow later. And some sort of politics are involved, though I’m unsure what or why or with who.
Once I hit page 50, I just didn’t seem to care about anything, the plot or characters and I was still confused about a lot so this is a DNF.
I’ll be passing the book to my younger sister to try and she might love it so I’ll let you know.
Cassie Swindon 