Review: The Untold Story

The Untold Story by Genevieve Cogman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A rip-roaring conclusion to an excellent series. The hints about the origin of the multiverse, the Library, the dragons and the fae that have been teased in the last couple of books come into the foreground, and once again, Irene has to step up and do brave and principled things with the help of her loyal allies to keep widespread badness from affecting multiple worlds. The pacing is brisk, but not at the cost of exposition or character development, and the action is intelligent and means something; it's not just pretty fireworks.

One thing I appreciated that you wouldn't get from every author: Even though all of the arcs come to an emotionally satisfying conclusion, we don't get a neat explanation of everything. The original motivations of the main antagonists for setting up the situation as they did remain ambiguous, with several different possibilities proposed and no clear evidence as to which one is correct. And, in context, this works much better than the alternative.

As with all of the books in the series, the editing is good, though I did spot half a dozen typos. All of the words mean what they're being used to mean, the commas and apostrophes and hyphens are in the right places, and the author knows how to narrate in the past tense. I wish this didn't make this book stand out above the vast mass of books, indie and trad-published, that I read, but sadly it does.

I hope the author goes on to write many more books as good as this, now that this series is concluded; I'll certainly be watching for them.

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