The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman


Summary: Taken from Goodreads
The first installment of an adventure featuring stolen books, secret agents and forbidden societies - think Doctor Who with librarian spies!

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.

My Thoughts:

Rated 2 Stars.

The Invisible Library is Cogman's first installment in The Invisible Library series and I may give the second book (which comes out in September) a chance.  We shall see.  When I first started reading the book, I thought it was really good and that it was going to be full of action.  Only problem is, there was so much action and too many characters being introduced in the story that it started to get boring.  At times the book lost me that I would be done with a few pages and not remember what I just read.  Cogman's writing threw too much at one shot.  A slower pace with not so many characters and actions happening so quickly would've made this book an easier read.

I would've preferred to know more about this Invisible Library and being the first of the series, Cogman should've spend more time explaining it to the reader.  I still don't understand what exactly this Invisible Library is.  The only fact about it that I do understand is why it even exists.  But how and where?  Still don't understand it.  The alternate worlds in this book were confusing too and I've read other books with alternate worlds before.  But they were clearer to understand.  All that I could make from this book was that they were in England.  But what time period did they travel to?

It was hard for me to like the characters in this book.  I thought I was going to like Irene when I began the book, but then her character just got boring for me.  The only character that came close to being likable was Kai, Irene's junior.  Cogman didn't put much depth into them or make them believable.  And characters kept coming into the book out of nowhere.  That's when it started getting confusing, and it was in the beginning of the book.

I think Cogman had a good concept, it was just too bad that she didn't develop it into a book that flowed better.

*My next book review will be on A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 

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