Review Detail

The Palace of Glass (The Forbidden Library #3)

Middle Grade Fiction 247

Libraries are dangerous places

March 27, 2016 (Updated: June 15, 2026)

Overall rating

4.0

Plot

4.0

Characters

N/A

Writing Style

N/A

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

N/A

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.