A review by melhara
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

3.0

This book had major Parasol Protectorate and Doctor Who vibes except instead of a Tardis that travels across time and space, we have a Library that is able to connect librarians to different alternate worlds with the sole mission of collecting works of fiction from different alternates.

"While all the alternate worlds exist, and while they may have different metaphysical laws, their physical laws are the same. Iron is iron, radium is radium, gunpowder is gunpowder, and if you drop an object, it will fall according to the law of gravity. Scientific discoveries are the same across the alternates, and while they are no doubt important, we don't value them as we do creative work. There may be a hundred brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in a hundred different worlds, and each time they may have written a different set of fairy tales. That's where our interest lies."

Cue Irene, a Librarian working for the Library, who is tasked with a mission to retrieve a Grimm manuscript from London B-395. There are a few problems though:
1) She must bring along her new mentee (whom she just met), and show him the ropes on his first mission.
2) The world they're traveling to is quarantined due to a high chaos infestation, meaning a high level of magic and disorder, making this a dangerous mission.
3) Bradamant, a rival librarian, also has her eyes set on this mission.
4) It appears that Irene's superiors are intentionally keeping information from her, which could affect the mission.

Nevertheless, Irene and her trainee, Kai, visit the alternate with the hopes of completing the mission and getting out of there as quickly as possible. Thrown into a steampunk, Victorian-era London with

A new world of great detectives, zeppelins, Fae, and dragons. She wasn't going to complain.

And she certainly wasn't going to run away. She had questions to ask and answers to find. She just hoped she lived long enough to enjoy it.

All things considered, I should have loved this book. After all, what kind of reader doesn't like reading about secret libraries and librarians going on fantastical missions to retrieve important books? This book had all the ingredients for a great story but I just felt like worldbuilding, particularly with respect to the library and the magic system, which is based around Language wasn't very well developed (perhaps more answers will be provided as the series progresses), the characters were also under-developed and one-dimensional, the conflict was kind of messy with plenty of holes.

Nevertheless, I think I'll still check out the second book with the hopes that there will be more character development, worldbuilding, and that the plot holes from the first book with be patched up later in the series.