Marsha's Reviews > The Invisible Library

This is a story for book lovers but not necessarily about book lovers. Irene (not her real name) spends most of her time traveling from one reality (or alternates, as they’re named here), stealing books for a shadowy Library. It is the Library, one that collects all works in as many alternates as it can find and forms a connection among worlds as well.

Irene would like to spend time sitting and reading books but her assignments keep her very busy. In fact, she doesn’t seem to read much at all. At one point, she manages to get her hands on a much sought-after book, one with the possibility to change worlds. Yet she barely gets to scan a line or two before the book is slammed shut. We’re meant to believe that she’s an avid reader. But how are we to believe that she’s a rabid bibliophile when we don’t get to see her actually read except once or twice in the storyline?

This niggling inconsistency aside, we are given instead a book of high adventure. Chase scenes, encounters with cyborg creations, eldritch horrors, conniving Fae and spells that open locked doors and animate stuffed animals are only some of the many intense scenes that are contained within these covers. Irene is a Librarian of many years’s experience. Watching her talk, fight and spell her way out of tight corners is fascinating to watch. She is a heroine of admirable cunning, intelligence and savvy.

However, even she occasionally finds herself in over her head. So she acquires allies and they are as strange and colorful as any reader could wish. While Irene strives to make herself unobtrusive, as befits a proper spy and thief, her allies are of a different breed. The story takes off with Irene alone but it truly soars when she walks hand-in-hand with Kai Strongrock and Lord Vale, an earl with a suspicious resemblance to a well-known fictional detective.

This book has its own in-world rules about magic and technology. Both are on display and are used to noteworthy effect. At one point, the story brings us face to face to Lovecraftian horror, the kind that is inexplicable, what H.P. termed the unnameable. It takes a writer of superb skill to delineate such a thing on the page so that the reader almost grasps the mind-twisting monstrosity that is presented. Alberich is a villain to be feared, one that is taken so far from humanity that he can only mimic its outer corners. Like Irene, we wonder what kind of bargains with what kinds of things Alberich had to make in order to achieve his warped version of immortality. This novel doesn’t give us the answer. But I’m certain future sequels may provide them.

It turns out to be a terrific book that also points out the advantages and disadvantages of hewing too closely to stories. I recommend it for all fantasy-loving readers.