2014 alternate-world fantasy. The Library connects all libraries;
agents are sent out into alternate worlds to collect unique books.
Irene is going to a steampunk Victorian London to retrieve a
particular edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, but it's all going to get
terribly complicated.
It's also a little uncomfortable. The Library appears to be run
at the whim of its infinitely deep bureaucracy, and its policies are
at best troubling. Many series would go to some trouble to establish
the meta-setting first before going into the world of this particular
book, but that's quickly whisked away and Irene is dumped into a
hazardous mission with minimal briefing and an apprentice she's never
even met before. This kind of casual carelessness with lives leaves me
somewhat out of sympathy with the place – obviously as an enthusiast
for books I start off in favour of libraries, so it shouldn't need
much to establish this organisation as the good guys, but the end
result seems more like self-interested hoarders, stealing books and
putting them away where only the privileged few can read them.
The writing is often awkward, and several times I had to re-read
sentences to try to work out exactly had been meant and who had
actually done a particular thing. It doesn't flow well. The Natural
History Museum has a Department of Cryptidology – "cryptid" was not
coined in English until 1983, and I was surprised by how much this
irked me.
Characterisation is decent, though we don't learn a great deal about
Irene as an individual rather than as a placeholder competent heroine.
If the world is a bit stock "every Victorian melodramatic trait, plus
airships" there's at least something of a justification. The
detective plot is mostly an excuse for the action, but the action does
work.
I was expecting, from the premise, to love this book, but instead I
merely quite liked it. That said, I'll probably read more in the series.
- Posted by J Michael Cule at
12:06pm on
12 July 2023
Ah, nitpicking about dates of word-coinage! You progress, my padwan!
Yes, these are... fun but I wouldn't call the books entirely coherent. It feels like I'm meant to be shocked by the revelations of What's Really Going On in each book when I don't have a clear idea of how the world is supposed to work in the first place.
This didn't stop me buying five books in the series, not that I can recall much about them now.
I wonder how much the fact I can quote books I read in my teens, twenties and thirties and not stuff I read a couple of years ago is down to my brain decaying and my memory filling up and how much to the decay of modern writing. Discuss. If you must.
- Posted by RogerBW at
01:09pm on
12 July 2023
Because I have a bit of a book-review buffer, I've just finished book 3, and I'm having serious doubts about continuing. Will see how I feel when book 4 comes up in the rotation.
There's something that I guessed here which is still being strongly hinted at in book 3 and I don't know when it'll be confirmed but I'll be amazed if it isn't. (Verar vf Nyorevpu'f qnhtugre.) I read a lot of SF and mystery stories in which one challenge to the reader is to work out what's going on, and these seem to hint at that structure, while making the puzzles really easy, so that the characters look stupid for not solving them faster.
- Posted by Owen Smith at
04:41pm on
12 July 2023
Was there a good reason for sending a female agent to a Victorian world? All other things being equal a man is going to have less difficulties in that time period.
- Posted by RogerBW at
05:02pm on
12 July 2023
Goodness knows! The faceless bureaucracy doesn't deign to explain itself.
- Posted by John P at
11:03pm on
12 July 2023
How disappointed will you be if the ultimate secret is a librarian who says "Ooook" and eats bananas?
- Posted by RogerBW at
08:05am on
13 July 2023
At this point it would feel pretty derivative, of course, but it would show a sense of humour which I find largely lacking in the series so far.
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