It took me some time but I’ve finally read the third book in the Invisible Library series. Sadly, I wasn’t as impressed as I was with the first two books, which means that I’m at a bit of a crossroads as to whether I want to continue the series.

The Burning Page takes place right after The Masked City (a book I just realised I read but didn’t review) and has all the character suffering the after-effects of being in a high-chaos world. But unfortunately, they can’t stop because Irene’s old nemesis, Alberich, has threatened to destroy the library. Now, Irene and Kai must go to another world to rescue a book that could potentially save them all.

So let’s start with what I didn’t like: Irene. Well, it’s not that I don’t like her, it’s that I got really annoyed with how often she mentioned that she found Kai good looking and by extension, how she doesn’t feel as attractive in comparison. It feels like she says this every time Kai changes clothes, which happened quite a few times. I got the point that Kai was good looking in the first book and even if I was starting the series here, I don’t think I need to be told once or twice. There was some other annoying repetitions, like about how dragons are so about order and how they can be really condescending but this repetition was the one I was most annoyed at for some reason. It sounds like a small thing now that I’ve written it out, but it annoyed me quite a bit while I was reading.

In terms of plot, it was a little bit all over the place. I liked the face-off against Alberich, but the assignment for Irene to steal a book didn’t really fit in. Again, I get that this is what librarians do, but we never actually get an explanation or evidence that the book is actually important to the fight against Alberich. If it was mentioned, then it got lost in the actual fight and I missed it.

That said, I liked that Zayanna, one of the minor characters in The Masked City, made a reappearance. She was a fun character and being fae, was a very good foil to Kai’s dragon nature. Her way of talking was very affected but I enjoyed the scenes that she was in. That said, I wish that she had a little more character development because it would have helped a lot with what happened towards the end.

Overall, I’m torn about whether I want to continue the book. The setup is still interesting and I like the world where there’s a Library stealing rare books for themselves. That said, I’m not sure how many more times I can read about Kai being good looking without looking for a way to hop into Irene’s reality (as she does) and tell her to stop.