Goodreads Rating: 3.73 stars

Amazon Rating: 4.2 stars

Amazon Summary:

One thing any Librarian will tell you: the truth is much stranger than fiction...

Irene is a professional spy for the mysterious Library, a shadowy organization that collects important works of fiction from all of the different realities. Most recently, she and her enigmatic assistant Kai have been sent to an alternative London. Their mission: Retrieve a particularly dangerous book. The problem: By the time they arrive, it's already been stolen.

London's underground factions are prepared to fight to the death to find the tome before Irene and Kai do, a problem compounded by the fact that this world is chaos-infested—the laws of nature bent to allow supernatural creatures and unpredictable magic to run rampant. To make matters worse, Kai is hiding something—secrets that could be just as volatile as the chaos-filled world itself.

Now Irene is caught in a puzzling web of deadly danger, conflicting clues, and sinister secret societies. And failure is not an option—because it isn’t just Irene’s reputation at stake, it’s the nature of reality itself...

My Thoughts:

Everything about this book was underwhelming. The plot tried to be active and interesting but for the most part I was just bored. I could never get a direct read on the characters and their intentions. The thing which irked me to no end was the “all powerful” Library and the ridiculous plot devices the author tried to use.

The Library is a timeless society which lives in between alternate worlds and cultivates the best literature from each world. That I can live with. But the library has its own “language” which only librarians can speak and they can command things to unlock or people to do things. They have to be specific or else things won’t work. The way this was employed in the story had me scratching my head and thinking “you’ve got to be kidding me.”

And in no way are you going to get me to believe that age-old and wise librarians would send Irene on this mission and then just leave her there with an apprentice to hopefully get the job done when their number one arch rival is also in the world. No backup was sent. Nada.

I also couldn’t figure out which genre this book was trying to be. Fantasy? Mystery? Espionage? Was this book young adult or middle grade or adult? I couldn’t tell and I read the whole dang thing.

Anyway, I really wish I had skipped over this book. Great idea in theory but horribly executed.