The Invisible Library, by Genevieve Cogman

I think I’ve mentioned on here before that my husband and I are both avid readers but we often don’t like the same books. We’re always recommending books to each other but they don’t always work out. Jason has been completely immersed in this “Invisible Library” series of which this is the first book, and he urged me to check it out. I’m not sure I’ve become as avid a fan as he is, but I did enjoy it and will likely read on.

The premise of this fantasy series is that The Library is … well, a vast and powerful library equipped with portals that allow librarians to travel between different alternate worlds/realities, picking up (and sometimes, well, stealing) rare books from different worlds and bringing them back to the Library. Why exactly they need to do this, other than sheer bibliophilia, is not fully explained in this first book, but our main character, librarian Irene, is beginning to suspect there ay be more going on here than just stashing lots of copies of books from all over the multiverse. With her new trainee librarian Kai, who may be more than he appears, she travels to a sort-of steampunk version of London, where she tracks down a version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales belonging to a recently-murdered nobleman. There are, of course, enemies both local and interdimensional to dodge, and a lot of loose threads left dangling that I’m sure will be picked up in later books. This was a good introduction to what seems like a fun series.