Damn … this book is going to be one of those The Last Jedi situations for me, I can already tell. In other words, I was disappointed with the novel/didn’t love it for my own story reasons but a lot of the people leaving negative reviews are doing it for ridiculous conservative reasons. It’s like, “I didn’t have an issue with those things, you book-banning transphobes, I just wanted a more engaging main character/overall story.”
It starts off strong, following the main character and narrator, Alix (named after the Library of Alexandria) through what should be a normal day but is actually turning out to be a terrible, horrible, very bad, no good day. She loses one of her jobs, her roommate kicks her out, she can’t get into her bank account because someone has stolen her identity. In her mid 20s, Alix is a former foster child and libraries, especially the Boston Public Library, have always been her sanctuary – first a place of connection with the mother who abandoned her for a guy, then a refuge and place to escape from foster homes and reality. This time, as she is about to break down, the doors to the Reading Room don’t take her to her favorite part of the library, though. Instead she ends up in the Astral Library, a magical place where the patrons can enter books and be absorbed as background characters.
There are a few rules: the books have to be in the public domain, each patron is limited to three choices so choose wisely but there is room to realize if maybe Regency era tea parties weren’t quite as fun as you expected. Time stops in the Library but progresses normally in books. Patrons have to renew their books yearly, and can go back to return to the life they have beyond the plot, start the story over, whatever they prefer.
Before Alix can even make it to her first novel, the Librarian receives a notice alerting her to some danger to a patron, and Alix, unwilling to be left alone, basically forces herself along for the ride. It quickly turns out that this attack isn’t targeted at one or even two specific patrons but an attack on the Library as a whole.
As part of the adventure, Quinn also introduces the Astral Gallery, whose patrons choose to spend time in paintings, and AGNIS, the video game version. We get to meet a few different patrons, fellow readers who needed to escape their lives, including a woman fleeing an abusive husband, a young girl fleeing abusive parents, a boy whose family and oppressive, fundamentalist community won’t recognize his gender, and others who were able to spend time in the library, one of the last places people can spend time for free, and use resources.
I liked the message behind the novel, and enjoyed how it celebrated the importance of libraries, the space they fill in the society, and how they are shelter, community building and a resource, available to all, an equalizer and educator.
Unfortunately, it’s the story that didn’t quite work for me. I think there are two main contributors for why I didn’t love it the way I wanted to or even particularly enjoy it. One of them was Alix. Quinn did a great job initially of setting her up, the challenges she has faced, painting the picture of starting way behind the starting line and never being able to catch a break, only a bad day away from disaster with no safety net to rely on. But once we got into the story, there were a few points where she felt a bit overly self-involved and/or selfish. And on the one hand, I get it. She is barely scraping by, why shouldn’t she believe that the image others portray to the world is their reality? But for someone that reads so much, she really missed some cues when it came to Beau and the concept of faking it till you make it. She had no idea that others might also have struggles, simply because they weren’t as bad as hers.
I also logically understand that she had abandonment issues and that up until the moment her mother abandoned her to go to Silicon Valley, she adored her. But I needed her to be more angry at her mom. Instead we have her trying to make excuses for her mom even 18 years later, trying to come up with fantasies about her mother’s actual motivations, and she gets sidetracked multiple times by visions of her mother in books. This would have worked slightly better for me if there had been a tweak the story – if somehow Alix’s mom had simply never come home, I could understand the justifications more, the wondering what happened and trying to explain it, giving her mom the benefit of doubt. But her mom literally told her, “the guy I am dating wants to move west and doesn’t like kids, so bye.”
The other challenge was that, ultimately, the novel was maybe a little bit too meta for me, and I didn’t totally connect with the tone. I think most book lovers also love a novel about reading, books, book stores, libraries etc – whether that is something like The Shadow of the Wind, Long Live Evil, The Eyre Affair … magical libraries, stepping into books, there are many previous examples of novels like this. Some authors make the setting feel more timeless, while others might be a bit more irreverent and quippy about it. I don’t think I necessarily have a preference between the two but apparently, I don’t like a novel to be too much of a blend. Alix kept interrupting with questions in a way that was more annoying than enthusiastic and I guess I just didn’t love how some of the references were so timely (Yarros, SJM). I loved Long Live Evil, I am so excited about Ilona Andrews’s upcoming novel This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me so I am up for a romp in magical books but this one just didn’t get the balance right. I usually appreciate when the main character doesn’t spend half the novel in denial about the supernatural and gets on board with what is happening but this one almost went too far into the other direction. Honestly, maybe this is less of a second issue and more of a sub issue of my previous point about not being that into the main character.
This might work a little better for others, I know one person I know read and enjoyed it, mentioning the costuming specifically, and a lot of the details are good, I liked Beau and so many other things but just wish I had been on the journey with someone else.
