Tuesday, November 19, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Lost Plot by Genevieve Cogman




The Lost Plot is the fourth book in Genevieve Cogman's ongoing series, "The Invisible Library".  I've kind of loved this series, which if you've missed it is an incredibly fun series about Irene, an agent for a multiversal Library that collects rare books from across the multiverse and tries to avoid getting involved with the battle across the worlds between the Dragons - agents of order - and the Fae - agents of chaos.  But again, the key thing about the series is how the setup allows Cogman to vary things up in really fun ways - so we have the most common setting being a version of London with Fae and fantasy creatures, but we've also seen a high tech world run by dragons, a fantasy version of Venice overrun by Fae, etc.

In this book, we get into an alternate version of 1920s New York, in which our incredibly fun and quick-thinking heroine Irene has barely any time to breathe as she attempts to outwit multiple parties, both human and not, in order to save the day.  As with the last review I did of this series, I suspect this review will be a bit short - mainly because I'm running out of ways to say: "Still really fun and enjoyable!"  There's nothing in this series that makes it an absolute must read, but the ability to always be really fun and read at a really good pace should not be undervalued.



-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
What should have been a simple mission to obtain a book going wrong for Irene really isn't that surprising at this point, if still disappointing.  What is surprising is for Irene to come back from such a mission, while Kai is away on dragon business, to be confronted by another dragon.  And what is disturbing is that dragon's implication that Irene might be for sale in helping to obtain a book in order to help that dragon win a contest of dragon politics - especially when that dragon implies that another librarian has taken such an offer.

And so it falls to Irene to investigate the situation, along with Kai as her only support.  The search takes her to an alternate version of prohibition era 1920s New York, filled with mobsters, bootleggers, and aggressive cops - to say nothing of the forces of the two dragons trying to use the world as a playground for their personal politics.  Irene will have to deal with all of these factions - whether they know who she is or not - as she attempts to search for the librarian who may have violated the rules against neutrality in order to extract him....and if she's caught, she knows the library will disavow any knowledge of her actions, leaving her high and dry.....
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Lost Plot sort of continues in the vein of the second book in this series (The Masked City) - our main antagonist of the series doesn't appear, and we spend most of the book, after an initial setup, dealing with a new world setting, only with Dragons replacing the Fae in terms of the source of the conflict.  But as always, we're following our heroine, Irene as she deals with one new complication to her mission after another, whether it be an unknown dragon henchman, a police captain who thinks she's a mob boss, an actual mob boss with his special enforcer, and of course the major dragon threats and the rogue librarian themselves.  The book rarely takes a minute to rest before running from one crazy circumstance to another - although it does split us off onto Kai's separate viewpoint for a very short segment.

And man does that result in a lot of fun.  Irene is armed only with her quick wits, her ability to use the Language to manipulate the reality of the world, and whatever allies she can manage to find, and somehow she keeps coming up with innovative ways to try and get through it all.  And the dialogue and interplay between the characters is tremendous - I think I've tweeted out book quotes from this series as much as any other series - and I continued that with this book, and yet none of the wackiness feels out of place.

Seriously, like my only complaint at all about this book is that one of our main trio of characters, the Sherlock Holmes-analogue Vale, who was one of Irene's love interests, is completely absent from this book - which is a bit weird since this book takes a major turn in Irene's relationship with Kai, which on would think would affect Vale quite a bit - except he's entirely absent.  But the book doesn't really give us much time at all to breathe - in a good way, and its fast pace really doesn't make it so there's much time to miss Vale all too much.

I've enjoyed all four books in this series, and this might be my favorite honestly?  It's certainly a step up from book 3, so yeah, I'll be continuing on in this series, and if you haven't started it somehow and were reading this review - go read it.  You'll have fun, trust me.


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)