What I'm reading
Mar. 16th, 2019 09:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
readerjaneFinished The Masked City, second in Genevieve Cogman's The Invisible Library series.
I'm not getting what I'd hoped for from this series: an examination of whether a superhero's achievements justify the damage they do in the process. These Librarians with their reality-altering Language steal rare books from the multiverse, using those books to stabilize ties between worlds.
They're trying to hold a balance between the Fae, who are agents of chaos, and the dragons, agents of order. Maintaining a temperate zone where humans can live is, okay, of paramount importance. But for a story that spends so much energy trying to get readers' buy-in by waving the splendor of HEROES OF OUR OWN... the practice of shelving rare books in an interdimensional archive where no one but Librarians will ever read them is kind of a big heroic flaw.
The series might examine this flaw at some point. I've only finished book two.
What it seems to be doing now, is exploring those two extremes on either side of the temperate zone. And the Fae-dominated, high-chaos worlds are pretty horrifying. The Fae describe those worlds as "high-virtue", a telling phrase. Dragons become deathly ill just by breathing the air of Fae-dominated universes. The more powerful Fae can bend reality to suit their own "stories", making all the humans and lesser Fae nearby into bit players in a melodrama centered around themselves. It all involves a lot of back-stabbing, manipulation, and ego.
Which is pretty much what the most powerful do in our own reality by leveraging money, influence, and news-spinning.
Kudos to Cogman for giving her heroine a creative way of escaping the Fae world. I won't spoil it.
Oh, and OMG the whumping.
I'm not getting what I'd hoped for from this series: an examination of whether a superhero's achievements justify the damage they do in the process. These Librarians with their reality-altering Language steal rare books from the multiverse, using those books to stabilize ties between worlds.
They're trying to hold a balance between the Fae, who are agents of chaos, and the dragons, agents of order. Maintaining a temperate zone where humans can live is, okay, of paramount importance. But for a story that spends so much energy trying to get readers' buy-in by waving the splendor of HEROES OF OUR OWN... the practice of shelving rare books in an interdimensional archive where no one but Librarians will ever read them is kind of a big heroic flaw.
The series might examine this flaw at some point. I've only finished book two.
What it seems to be doing now, is exploring those two extremes on either side of the temperate zone. And the Fae-dominated, high-chaos worlds are pretty horrifying. The Fae describe those worlds as "high-virtue", a telling phrase. Dragons become deathly ill just by breathing the air of Fae-dominated universes. The more powerful Fae can bend reality to suit their own "stories", making all the humans and lesser Fae nearby into bit players in a melodrama centered around themselves. It all involves a lot of back-stabbing, manipulation, and ego.
Which is pretty much what the most powerful do in our own reality by leveraging money, influence, and news-spinning.
Kudos to Cogman for giving her heroine a creative way of escaping the Fae world. I won't spoil it.
Oh, and OMG the whumping.
