Review: The Burning Page

The Burning Page by Genevieve Cogman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy these books, not least because they are almost impeccably edited, so I can relax into the story instead of being jerked out of it every few pages because the author doesn't have a firm grasp on the basic tools of their craft, like sentence structure, vocabulary, punctuation and verb tense.

They're also fast-moving, action-packed urban fantasies, with varied challenges confronting a capable, determined, but not overly perfect or spoiled protagonist in a setting that's easy to grasp but provides lots of scope for different adventures. The protagonist works for an interdimensional Library that connects to multiple alternate worlds, the more chaotic ones dominated by Fae, the more lawful ones by dragons, and the ones in between a zone of struggle between the two. There's also a renegade Librarian who's trying to bring the whole thing down, and has a decent chance of succeeding. (This is not the book to start with, by the way; begin at the start of the series. There's a bit of recap, but not much, and the earlier books are good too.)

A slight flaw in this one is that there's a Cavalry Rescue by means that are markedly vague; it's portrayed as providing the viewpoint character with plausible deniability, but I'm nearly certain that's a thin excuse for the author not actually being able to figure out how it was done. Apart from that, and a very occasional excess hyphen, there was nothing I could criticize.

It didn't make it quite to five stars for me, because I reserve that for books that I absolutely love and that, usually, have a bit more depth of reflection on what it means to be human (not that that's entirely lacking here; it's just not much of a focus, and the conclusions aren't particularly startling). But it easily enters my Best of the Year list at the Gold tier.

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