Thursday, January 23, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Secret Chapter by Genevieve Cogman




The Secret Chapter is the sixth book in Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series.  For those who are not yet familiar with the series, it's a tremendously fun (and sometimes meta) series featuring a multiverse of worlds, with a mixture of magic and technology, and conflicts between dragons and fae....and a main character whose primary focus is (supposed to be) obtaining rare copies of books for is titular Library.  The series trades in tropes like no one's business (in fact, the Fae in story are required to follow tropes by their very nature), but makes them fresh and new and fun in ways that make this series one of the most enjoyable reads I've found around - and I've finished each of the prior five books in the series within a single day of reading.

The Secret Chapter is another great installment in the series, with the bulk of the novel devoted to that most classic of story tropes: the heist story.  The story also delves even further into the running plot threads throughout the series as well as introducing new ones, and all of the newer characters are pretty great.  And again, the book is really damn fun - I finished it in under 24 hours again, and have already reread parts a few times.  In short, if you're not reading this series already and like fun SF/F, that does creative things with the literary tropes you see elsewhere, you should be reading it.

Note:  It is not recommended to start the series with this book, as while the series is not heavy on continuity and each book is a self contained story, it relies on enough prior material that new readers will probably be a bit lost.  Start with Book 1.  


--------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
In the short time since the Fae-Dragon peace treaty was signed, Irene and Kai have been trying to survive on Vale's world with their new duties...even as the Fae drag their heels on appointing their own representative.   But when Irene is called back to the Library with an urgent mission, she finds that the world she grew up on, which she still treasures, is in danger of sliding into chaos unless she can recover a rare book from the world.  Yet the only copy the Library has been able to locate is in the hands of a Fae who has taken the archetype of a megalomaniac criminal boss, complete with a hidden tropical island base, and worse: he is not one of the Fae who has signed the treaty.

And so Irene and Kai are sent to negotiate with him for the book, but he proposes something entirely different: that Irene and Kai work together with a group of other individuals and steal a painting from another world for him in exchange for the book.  But that world features a paranoid governmental agency on the lookout for anything paranormal, and rules with an iron fist.  Even worse, the crew Irene and Kai are forced to work with consists of a bunch of potentially unreliable Fae.....and an exiled Dragon with whom Kai has past history and may not be anymore trustworthy than the Fae.

It will take all of Irene's skills as a librarian in order to pull off the heist - and perhaps more than she's capable of if she wants to survive the aftermath to save her treasured world....
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As with the other novels in the series, The Secret Chapter tells the story from the perspective of Irene, our librarian heroine, as she tries to figure out the situations she gets herself into and do what's right to save the people she loves and to help the Library.  This novel, perhaps more than the others, also occasionally has bits from Kai's perspective (and doesn't even make a big deal of this unlike prior books), but again it's still mostly Irene's series, and she gets 90% of the page time.

And again, not to repeat myself, Irene is such a great and fun heroine, and she's a blast to follow as she tries to figure out how to use her abilities to get through the situations she finds herself into and Cogman continues to find new such situations that require newer and more innovative solutions from Irene.  As noted above, this is a Heist plot, with the classic tropes involved within: the employer who might want to backstab them at the last minute, the crew full of criminals with their own potential agendas on the side and unusual abilities, and the object to be stolen having more security and secrets than originally foreseen.....the works.

And of course, Irene - as a Librarian - is well aware of these tropes and tries to work around them.  Cogman manages this masterfully, and it all comes together in the end in excellent fashion, with elements from past books coming into play throughout as the plot moves on, and Irene having to both deal with and use those elements to get through it all accordingly.  In a way, it makes it one of the more continuity heavy books of the series, and it also sets up new plot threads for future books as well to follow.....well, eventually, given how slow this series has been at following some of even the most obvious of plot threads.  And yet, the book still works as a stand alone story, complete with utterly satisfying ending, through it all.

So yeah, I don't have much more to say here.  This series is insanely fun and you should be reading it.  This book is just another such crazy fun book.  So yeah it's great.
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