The Invisible Library Is a Booklover’s Dream

The Invisible Library exists somehow outside of time, in an ageless space only accessible to the initiated Librarian. Junior Librarian Irene is sent on a mission to an alternate Victorian England in order to pick up an important copy of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales. Irene is the daughter of two Librarians, which is something relatively unheard of. Mostly Librarians are taken from various alternates once they’ve traveled too far down the rabbit hole, so to speak, investigating the odd events that occasionally accompany a Librarian’s acquisition.
Librarians use something called Language in their pursuits, more bone-deep than magic, but drifting, the way actual languages do. Language isn’t a false glamour, but something that works on the thingness of a thing. A Librarian can easily use Language to open a lock (or lock a lock), because that’s what a lock does; it’s altogether harder to make, say, a stuffed crocodile attack the bad guys. (To cite an entirely unrelated hypothetical, wink wink.) But Language also shifts, acquiring new grammar and vocabulary as the various alternate worlds change and diverge. (This is interesting, because usually these sort of ur-languages are inviolate and unchanging.)

There’s a lot wrong with the mission Irene is given. First, the politics of the Library are completely bananas. Because the Library exists outside of time, the senior Librarians can be hundreds of years old, or more. After gadding about (like Irene does) in the various alternate realities picking up books (and aging), Librarians retire to the Library itself to set up their inevitable fiefdoms. Irene’s senior Librarian is in conflict with another, who oversees Bradamant, a Librarian who pulls a lot of nasty stunts on Irene through the course of the book, and it’s hard to know if it’s personal or just politics, or if there’s any meaningful difference.
Irene is saddled with a trainee, Kai, who is both horribly green and potentially a lot more than he lets on. He respects Irene’s greater experience and authority, but is clearly dangerously powerful in his own right. Irene and Kai are sent to a quarantined world, one with a chaos infection—alternate worlds all have a balance of order and chaos, and the ones that bend too far into chaos are treated gingerly. What that means, for this world, is that there’s a steampunk-y mix of impossible technology and fairy magic. Things like vampires and werewolves, technically impossible but still rule-bound, exist in a strange mix of chaos and order, rubbing elbows with the Fae, who are almost wholly chaotic.

Irene and Kai’s first forays into this alternate Britain are very much in the form of a murder mystery. A vampire, who was in possession of the Grimm’s Tales they are to acquire, is murdered at his own house party, during which a cat burglar very publicly snagged a ride on a dirigible, flaunting the theft of the book. So that’s a murder and a theft, and Irene and Kai have to very quickly insinuate themselves into the culture and society of this alternate world to crack the case. (That they claim to be Canadian, a tactic of many an American friend abroad, works about as well as one could expect.) They meet up with a rogue’s gallery of detectives, ambassadors, murderous criminal masterminds, rivals, and what all. There’s even a dirigible chase!
I haven’t had this much pure fun reading a novel in a long time. This is an energetic romp through a world where the stakes keep escalating and the relationships deepening. There’s a lot about the Library’s purpose that needs clarifying, questions posed to Irene and Kai through the course of their sleuthing that are never quite answered. The steampunk analogues to some of my favorite literary characters—there’s a Sherlock Holmesian persona both lovable and annoying the way know-it-alls are—are an absolute joy to read about. The next few books in the series are coming later this year, and you can count on me reading them, in this reality or any other.
The Invisible Library is available now.