Barely has Librarian/spy Irene settled into her new role as Librarian-in-residence on Vale’s world than her Dragon assistant Kai is kidnapped, and it’s up to Irene, acting alone, and without help from the Library, to get him back, and possibly prevent a war.
The second volume in Genevieve Cogman’s excellent Invisible Library series is, if possible, more self-assured and fun than the first. There’s no sign of second-book nerves here. Cogman throws us into the middle of the action and then back-tracks from there; an old trick, but an effective one, and one that Cogman’s writing is good enough to pull off with aplomb. It takes a while to get to Venice, the masked city of the title, but once we do, the city that the author draws for us is beautiful to behold. It’s evocative, dangerous and lovely to read.
While the apparent Big Bad of the series, the disgraced former Librarian Alberich, remains off-stage for this book, the villain of the piece, the powerful Fae Lord Guantes, is just as effective and, in combination with his wife, quite the foil for Irene. Lord Silver returns as a decadent Fae aristocrat combining playing for power with playing with people in a turn that makes me sort of want to scrub myself down. He’s a lovely character. The rest of the supporting cast is mostly just sketched, something which works well for the Fae, given their embrace of narrative and storytelling roles. I would like to see Vale be slightly better developed, and become more than just a Holmes-clone, though.
Still, that’s just a little niggle in a series that has been, to date, a joy to read. I mean, for book-geeks like people who hang out at GoodReads, what’s not to love about a kick-ass female librarian who can rewrite reality around her! Roll on volume three.
