I don't know if anyone else bounced off of The Parasol Protectorate books as hard as I did. I wanted to like them, but failed to engage. This book, I think, is in the same niche as them, but I enjoyed it quite a bit, and read it in an evening.

Consider a sort of Thursday Next/Golden Compass pastiche, not too ambitious but determined to have fun. Irene is an agent of The Library, a murky institution at the nexus of worlds, and speaker of The Language, a vaguely defined mechanism for commanding reality. She has junior agent Kai foisted upon her, and goes to do The Library's bidding on a chaotic world, stymied by her old nemesis/mentor, only to discover things are much more dangerous than they seem.

Irene is fun, in that she is the cranky "fuck it!" type of hero, but also just really wants to steal good books and read them, and because she has a fascinating chemistry with her old mentor. Now, it is possible that Irene is not as queer as I want her to be, which would be sad, but she'll always be queer in my heart.