Marsha's Reviews > The Burning Page

Irene Winters makes her reappearance in this followup to her stay in a chaos-ridden Venice and the stakes are even higher. The malevolent Alberich is back and his plan is more terrifying than ever.

New faces, new enemies and shifting loyalties means that Irene is forced to rely on the very few people she knows—and one of them may be a traitor.

Peregrine Vale is also on the scene. His amorous interest in Irene is reciprocated but he’s reluctant to let her become involved with a man as broken as he. His addiction to morphine nearly breaks him and his unasked-for incursion into a high-chaos world in the previous volume may be worsening his condition.

Irene has hard choices to make. She’s constantly rejecting the offer by the dragon king to work for him (that would compromise the neutrality of the Library), in spite of Kai’s wearying pitches. She must deal with Kai’s PTSD after being kidnapped and held prisoner in a world inimical to his very being. The pesky Fae Silver isn’t much in evidence but another Fae is, much to her annoyance.

Ms. Cogman has a gift for writing action scenes. They practically spring off the page. The tension gets wound ever tighter with each chapter. It’s not merely chase scenes and negotiations, however; Irene is battling for the very existence of the Library itself. Time and time again, I wondered when she gets a chance to sleep. She’s only in her 30s but she can’t keep up this pace for much longer. (If I have any complaints about this novel, it’s that Kai and Peregrine once again come to her rescue, even after she forbids them to do so. If they’re always going to be popping up like dei ex machina, I’m going to be very disappointed.)

The action builds to a climactic and terrifying finish but with the promise of more to come. You can only hope that Irene gets to have a nice quiet lie-in, after a fortifying cup of brandy.