Reviews: The Masked City (3)

I’d just finished reading the excellent ‘The Invisible Library’ and couldn’t wait to dive into this second book in the series ‘The Masked City’. I wasn’t disappointed, this maybe even better than the first with more action and an even more gripping adventure.

Our junior Librarian the lovely Irene shines brightly in this new story and her colleagues Kai and Vale are still very much involved. Fabulous fantasy and if you read the first book then I can highly recommend this for you to read and enjoy too.

Irene is quickly turning into a bookish superstar heroine, what’s not to like about her. She loves books, works as a secret agent for a library (not just any library, but The Library!), she can be magical when required and she gets about a bit, in various parallel worlds having fantastical encounters. Quite a girl and author Genevieve Cogman delights us with an involving breathless chase against time for Irene to a chaotic world to free a precious captive. Failure could lead to a great war which nobody wants. The Fae, vampires, werewolves and dragons provide lots of entertainment and we meet a few new fascinating characters along the way.

The author wraps the reader in her world-building providing general rules, mythology, antagonistic factions and threatening villains from the past. It gives the reader boundaries and insights into the world that Irene inhabits. This series is proving to be hugely well developed and Irene at centre stage a truly wonderful lead character. Imaginative, well-paced and engaging this is a very good read, one not to miss and I look forward to the next in the series with expectant anticipation. (ARC Received)

Now that the rules of the Invisible Library universe have been established at a basic level, Genevieve Cogman gets to have some real fun in this book with the rules of story. The Fae feed off humans by acting in the role of a story archetype, drawing the humans to play the bit-parts around them. In a world ruled by Fae and chaos, narrative law is stronger than physics or common sense. Irene has to learn to manipulate the Fae’s own lives against them if she’s to have any chance of saving Kai – before she becomes the villain in someone else’s story.

We get a much closer look at the politics and structure of Fae society in The Masked City, and we encounter some truly legend-worthy figures. If the Horse is as powerful as we see, then I don’t want to imagine what horror the Rider could enact. Through it all, Irene (mostly) keeps her head. And this time the stakes are personal. Kai’s kidnapping could have disastrous consequences, not just for Irene’s fledgling found family, but also for the universe as a whole.

The Fae who took Kai mean to provoke war with the dragons, a war to end all wars and probably even reality itself. Irene has to break into the very seat of their power in order to stop a conflict that would rage across worlds.

Of course, being the Irene that I know and absolutely love, she also has time to discuss morality with the opposition, manipulate a few Fae narrative and argue with her supervisor – not to mention conduct diplomatic talks with a dragon king.

This is, as I now realise I should expect from Genevieve, a deliciously drawn world full of sensation, flavour, and the heavy press of danger. The Venice of the Fae’s stories, and of ours, is of course different from the Venice of our reality. Genevieve plays upon that delight we’ve given to fictional Venice, and builds palaces and prisons to rival the great epics of fiction.

I adored the first book in this series and I'm glad that the second is just as much fun to read. A continuous stream of adventure, that knowingly pulls on story tropes and archetypes (Irene is a librarian, after all) and does it so well. Irene is a wonderful, capable character and a joy to read. I would reread these and enjoy them just as much the second time.