The Invisible Library - Genevieve Cogman

Title: The Invisible Library
Author: Genevieve Cogman
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 2/5
# pages: 329
Date read: September, 2019

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'm really sad to only give this 2 stars, because I'd been so eager to read it! It came highly recommended and sounded like something I would absolutely adore... but it ended up taking me almost half a year to read, and could only just make it to "Okay". It wasn't bad... I just didn't care. I didn't care about any of the characters, I didn't care about their plight, and I certainly didn't care about the budding relationship. The writing was fine, so I wasn't bored by the book... I just didn't care.

I think a lot of my problem with it, was the steampunk / fae aspects. I really liked the first few chapters, where Irene and the library were introduced, and had the entire book been like that, I'd probably have loved it! But as soon as Irene entered alternative London it started to fall flat for me, and it took me more than 3 months to read the last 100 pages. I can see the next book is more of the same, so I'm just going to leave it in the "not for me" pile.