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3.54 AVERAGE
3.54 AVERAGE
I love Rebecca Makkai’s storytelling SO much. I was so absorbed in this story and will think of Ian and Lucy for such a long time. I love when a book can leave me hoping they’re out there somewhere, safe and happy.
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Makkai’s The Borrower is the foil to Nabokov’s Lolita I never knew I wanted. From the perspective of Lucy Hull, an unreliable narrator in her own right but a children’s librarian with good intentions, befriends a precocious-and-maybe-gay-10-year-old boy named Ian who spends most of his time asking Lucy for book recommendations at her library. She discovers his mother is an evangelical who may have suspicions about his sexuality, sending him to a pastor who lives to de-gay people in the name of God. Lucy’s potentially misguided instincts leads her to kidnap Ian on a 10-day road trip to protect him from his circumstances, and she intellectualizes that she is at Ian’s whim and the kidnapping was his own orchestration. She’s faced with her own quest for identity and meaning, raising ethical questions about agency and her morally ambiguous behavior and the power of people and books. Makkai’s frequent references to books (including Lolita) through Lucy’s profession as a librarian become self-referential, echoing The Borrower’s own themes and characters. It was an enjoyable, stressful read that doesn’t fully come together until the last few pages, but it was worth the wait.
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Ugh!!! I loved Ian Drake. And Ms. Hull had a few good one liners and her dad was great, but it was so ridiculous and I could not EVER understand or justify the "borrowing" especially after the ending. And so many characters were not well developed. Ian Drake saved this book for me.
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I'm still trying to sort out exactly how I feel about this book, but I think I can safely say that it's amazing.
Lucy is a 26-year-old coasting through life -- her job as a children's librarian is the result of an alumni connection and her only friend is another library employee who is apparently in love with her. Her only goal in life is to not be like her father, a Russian immigrant with obvious underworld ties. She's likable and relatable, although I wanted to shake her many times, sometimes for her lack of motivation and sometimes because of her lack of restraint.
The premise of the book is that Ian, one of the library's young patrons, runs away from home and then persuades/forces Lucy to take him on a cross-country trip. Of course, there's more to the story than that. Lucy has already come under fire from Ian's fundamentalist Christian mother for giving the boy books that do not contain "the breath of God," and she's discovered that Ian is enrolled in anti-gay classes.
As Lucy's poor (albeit well-intentioned) choices snowball out of control, she learns new things about her own family and friends that make her question many of her assumptions about her life. You know from the beginning that everything won't turn out well. If common sense doesn't dictate that, the prologue gives a good clue. And yet, this book was impossible for me to put down. I had to see it to it's final, painful (although not completely hopeless) conclusion.
The story in itself is excellent and thought-provoking. What pushes this book over the top is all the literary references, from Nabokov allusions to emulations of various well-loved children's books: If You Give a Librarian a Closet, an untitled addition which could be called "The Very Hungry Librarian", etc.
Lucy is a 26-year-old coasting through life -- her job as a children's librarian is the result of an alumni connection and her only friend is another library employee who is apparently in love with her. Her only goal in life is to not be like her father, a Russian immigrant with obvious underworld ties. She's likable and relatable, although I wanted to shake her many times, sometimes for her lack of motivation and sometimes because of her lack of restraint.
The premise of the book is that Ian, one of the library's young patrons, runs away from home and then persuades/forces Lucy to take him on a cross-country trip. Of course, there's more to the story than that. Lucy has already come under fire from Ian's fundamentalist Christian mother for giving the boy books that do not contain "the breath of God," and she's discovered that Ian is enrolled in anti-gay classes.
As Lucy's poor (albeit well-intentioned) choices snowball out of control, she learns new things about her own family and friends that make her question many of her assumptions about her life. You know from the beginning that everything won't turn out well. If common sense doesn't dictate that, the prologue gives a good clue. And yet, this book was impossible for me to put down. I had to see it to it's final, painful (although not completely hopeless) conclusion.
The story in itself is excellent and thought-provoking. What pushes this book over the top is all the literary references, from Nabokov allusions to emulations of various well-loved children's books: If You Give a Librarian a Closet, an untitled addition which could be called "The Very Hungry Librarian", etc.
A delight! This perfectly charming tale of a misfit kid and the young librarian that befriends him is a great read. 4.5 stars.
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
though it is, at times, hard to empathize with Lucy's actions, her motives are so clear to me. i felt myself being whisked along a rollercoaster of "you can't go home" to maybe "home is the only place you can go". deeply excited to read more Makkai.
Man, this one was disappointing for me. Honestly, part of me thinks this is lower than a 3-star one for me.
I think my expectations were just too high for this one. One of my co-workers uncovered this for a reading challenge we did at work a couple of years ago, and the book made the rounds and was pretty well-liked by those who read it I think. And last year (or earlier this year maybe, I can't remember and am too lazy to look it up), I read The Great Believers and that was such a remarkable book. One that imprinted itself on my heart.
The Borrower though? It was kind of a mess for me. For starters, I just didn't find Lucy Hull particularly interesting or, honestly, likable. In fact, I found her to be whiny and actually kind of rude. She seemed to take for granted the people she had in her life. The part of the story that involved her Russian father felt a bit forced, and the entire storyline was honestly super over the top for me. Your favorite child at the library runs away to the library, you find him there, and decide to....put him in your car and drive out of town? Her thought process made no sense to me whatsoever.
Even Ian wasn't as engaging as I would have liked for him to be. Sure, he had spunk, but I never felt like I knew him. The only way the reader really gets to know Ian is through Lucy's view of him, her projection of who he is onto him. It's hard to even know how accurate that is - overall he's a pretty emotionally closed-off kid, honestly. He doesn't give the reader (or at least this reader) much to work with.
Here's the thing too - there is a love of books here that is very readily apparent. Lucy is (reluctantly) working as a children's librarian, and there are a number of chapters that either begin or entirely consist of plays on various children's books (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, choose-your-own-adventure stories, etc.). Those are clever and interesting, and belie a love of literature, on top of fitting well with Lucy's own personality/occupation. But as a librarian, I didn't appreciate the portrayal of librarians in the book. Lucy doesn't regard her job very highly, her boss, the head librarian is portrayed as a clueless drunk, and even a librarian that Lucy and Ian encounter later is portrayed as rude and not particularly helpful. It really, really bothered me. And maybe that's just me being too sensitive, but it was really annoying to me.
That being said, there are moments of brilliance here. And given that this was Makkai's first novel, you can see seeds of what will come in future writing. The epilogue (of sorts) at the end is beautifully written - probably the strongest two or three pages of the entire book. I just wish more of that was there, and that more of the story somehow tied together. As Lucy herself discusses at various points in the book -- the events that take place almost feel like they could have been a dream -- which makes it all feel low stakes and kind of disappointing in the end, honestly.
I think my expectations were just too high for this one. One of my co-workers uncovered this for a reading challenge we did at work a couple of years ago, and the book made the rounds and was pretty well-liked by those who read it I think. And last year (or earlier this year maybe, I can't remember and am too lazy to look it up), I read The Great Believers and that was such a remarkable book. One that imprinted itself on my heart.
The Borrower though? It was kind of a mess for me. For starters, I just didn't find Lucy Hull particularly interesting or, honestly, likable. In fact, I found her to be whiny and actually kind of rude. She seemed to take for granted the people she had in her life. The part of the story that involved her Russian father felt a bit forced, and the entire storyline was honestly super over the top for me. Your favorite child at the library runs away to the library, you find him there, and decide to....put him in your car and drive out of town? Her thought process made no sense to me whatsoever.
Even Ian wasn't as engaging as I would have liked for him to be. Sure, he had spunk, but I never felt like I knew him. The only way the reader really gets to know Ian is through Lucy's view of him, her projection of who he is onto him. It's hard to even know how accurate that is - overall he's a pretty emotionally closed-off kid, honestly. He doesn't give the reader (or at least this reader) much to work with.
Here's the thing too - there is a love of books here that is very readily apparent. Lucy is (reluctantly) working as a children's librarian, and there are a number of chapters that either begin or entirely consist of plays on various children's books (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, choose-your-own-adventure stories, etc.). Those are clever and interesting, and belie a love of literature, on top of fitting well with Lucy's own personality/occupation. But as a librarian, I didn't appreciate the portrayal of librarians in the book. Lucy doesn't regard her job very highly, her boss, the head librarian is portrayed as a clueless drunk, and even a librarian that Lucy and Ian encounter later is portrayed as rude and not particularly helpful. It really, really bothered me. And maybe that's just me being too sensitive, but it was really annoying to me.
That being said, there are moments of brilliance here. And given that this was Makkai's first novel, you can see seeds of what will come in future writing. The epilogue (of sorts) at the end is beautifully written - probably the strongest two or three pages of the entire book. I just wish more of that was there, and that more of the story somehow tied together. As Lucy herself discusses at various points in the book -- the events that take place almost feel like they could have been a dream -- which makes it all feel low stakes and kind of disappointing in the end, honestly.