The Palace of Glass (The Forbidden Library #3)

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The Palace of Glass (The Forbidden Library #3)

Author(s)

Django Wexler

Publisher

Kathy Dawson Books

Genre(s)

Age Range

10+

Release Date

April 12, 2016

ISBN

9780803739789

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For Alice, danger threatens from inside the library as well as out. Having figured out the role her master and uncle, Geryon, played in her father's disappearance, Alice turns to Ending—the mysterious, magical giant feline and guardian of Geryon's library—for a spell to incapacitate Geryon. But, like all cats, Ending is adept at keeping secrets and Alice doesn't know the whole story. Once she traps Geryon with Ending's spell, there's no one to stop the other Readers from sending their apprentices to pillage Geryon's library. As Alice prepares to face an impending attack from the combined might of the Readers, she gathers what forces she can—the apprentices she once thought might be her friends, the magical creatures imprisoned in Geryon's library—not knowing who, if anyone, she can trust.

Editor reviews

4 reviews

Overall rating

4.0

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4.0(1)

A Great Series

June 05, 2016

Overall rating

4.0

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This series keeps getting better!

The Palace of Glass puts us right back on track, beginning with Alice’s newfound resolve to do something about her situation. What to do with her Uncle? After all, he cannot be trusted. Now is the time for her to plot her revenge.

After the wild ride of The Mad Apprentice, The Palace of Glass once again sees Alice back jumping through portal books, discovering new worlds, and meeting new races of magical beings. Ah…if only that was possible in real life. But even good things can have bad consequences. The plot surges ahead diving through molten tunnels, charging into frozen kingdoms of the ice giants before Alice even attempts to take on the challenges in the Palace of Glass.

What I love about The Palace of Glass is how Django Wexler mixes of humor and adventure while allowing deeper themes to be weaved in it as well. Alice of course continues to grow as a character, asking the important questions about her powers and responsibilities as a Reader. With each book comes more complex moral issues, and deeper plot development. We see old and new faces handling danger the best way they can.

Django Wexler again shows he is a master world builder as he adds layers into the world of Readers and the Forbidden Library. His descriptions are fantastical yet feel very real. He helps build up a series of events and helps develop Alice in such a way that the reader is sure she can take on more adventures and what ever danger is thrown in her way.

The book just flew by and I wasn’t really ready to say goodbye to the characters. The way The Palace of Glass ended there is a feeling that there is more coming. It looks like there are some pretty big adventures in store for the 4th installment. Highly Recommended.

Good Points

Fun read
Action packed
Page turner

Joanne Mumley, Twitter Manager Top 50 Reviewer 217 reviews

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Libraries are dangerous places

March 27, 2016

Overall rating

4.0

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After ending up with her uncle in The Forbidden Library and being involved in a rip roaring adventure in The Mad Apprentice, Alice has come to realize that her uncle caused her father's death and is determined to neutralize him. When he leaves for a few days, she decides to take Ending's advice and travel to the Palace of Glass to obtain the book, The Infinite Prison, which can then be used to trap her uncle. Traveling through the kingdom of the fire sprites, she meets Flicker, and he travels with her through the land of the Ice Giants. They are all set to do Alice in, but she saves them from the Bluechill, and the leader's daughter, Erdrodr decides to join Alice in her adventure. They find a lot of prejudice against readers in their travels, and face lots of obstacles, like turtles who are jerks, but finally end up at the Palace. She asks for the book and it is given to her immediately, but then she is offered visions of her past, including some of her father and mother, and loses valuable time getting sucked into them. She returns home after Geryon does, and he is angry, but she uses the book to trap him. The problem? Other readers may take over her library, and the Ouroborean is set loose and might destroy everything anyway. Clearly, another book is in the works.

Good Points

While the Forbidden Library doesn't seem like the nicest place to be (as opposed to Shulman's New-York Circulating Material Repository from The Grimm Legacy ), the world building is quite complete. Like Delaney's The Last Apprentice series, there is also a nice feeling of ambiguity about who is good and who is evil, which adds a layer of interest to the characters. Should Alice hang out with Isaac, who serves another reader? Is Uncle Geryon as evil as Alice thinks he is? Is Ending a creature of good or a creature of evil? Those sorts of questions keep the reader guessing about which side should triumph.

Unlike some fantasy books, this had a clearly defined goal, and the characters made steady progress toward achieving it, which I really appreciated. While there are some descriptions of the different worlds through which Alice passes, they never drag down the plot. There is a lot of action and fighting, and Alice is triumphant most of the time, which is a nice change from forces of equal potency fighting all the time and ending in a draw!

Alice is a great character who does a good job of assessing her situation and using the forces around her to her own advantage. This series is a great one to give to readers who enjoyed Sanderson's Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians, Yansky's Alfred Kropp, Funaro's Alistair Grim series, or Jink's How to Catch a Bogle series, although The Forbidden Library takes place a few years later, in 1932.