The Invisible Library book review

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
Series: The Invisible Library #1
Published by Pan on December 15, 2014
Pages: 337
Goodreads

Irene must be at the top of her game or she'll be off the case – permanently . . .
Irene is a professional spy for the mysterious Library, which harvests fiction from different realities. And along with her enigmatic assistant Kai, she's posted to an alternative London. Their mission – to retrieve a dangerous book. But when they arrive, it's already been stolen. London's underground factions seem prepared to fight to the very death to find her book.
Adding to the jeopardy, this world is chaos-infested – the laws of nature bent to allow supernatural creatures and unpredictable magic. Irene's new assistant is also hiding secrets of his own.
Soon, she's up to her eyebrows in a heady mix of danger, clues and secret societies. Yet failure is not an option – the nature of reality itself is at stake.

I loved the premise of this book, the idea of a library being the source of all the different alternate realities within the universe. The Invisible Library seemed to have everything I wanted within a book, I was really hoping I had found a new favourite series to dive into. Unfortunately it wasn’t everything I hoped, and at some parts it became a real hard slog to get through.

Characters in The Invisible Library

They were all forgettable. I cannot remember any specifics about any of the characters apart from the fact that Kai was classically good-looking and Irene was stoically pro-library. There was nothing about their journey through The Invisible Library that connected me to them and to the way their story developed. All in all I found that their story was two dimensional and was lacking the excitement I usually look for in a book. I was bored by the different developments and even the climatic ending didn’t really impact me at all.

I think the one thing I enjoyed about the characters in this book was watching them use the language and the explanation of the schooling system. It definitely added depth and intrigue to the characters and it was one of the redeeming factors for me.

The Good and Bad

I think the concept of this one was a lot better than the execution. I loved the idea of having a library being the centre of all the alternative worlds, and it would probably be the one reason I would carry on the series. There was so much that could be looked at and there is a lot of potential so it’s definitely one of the reasons I would consider the other books. I did find reading The Invisible Library to be quite easy, there was nothing about the book that made it hard to read or get through but on the same thought there was nothing that made it stand out.

Moving onto the things that weren’t so great, for me would have to be the complete lack of explanation at some parts. I was really struggling through the exposition and things were happening that didn’t necessarily make all that much sense. There was so much time spent on useless information which could have been used for explaining the ins and outs of the world which I think would have been a little more interesting and worthwhile.

Recommendations

I enjoyed this one, but not enough to carry on with the series. I found that I was skipping parts and although the concept could have been one of my favourites, the writing style just wasn’t for me. It’s a shame because I thought I might have found a new favourite series, but it’s not worked out that way.

What have you read recently? Anything that has turned out to be a new favourite? Or did they leave you wanting?