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A review by caitcoy
Apex Magazine Issue 105 by Jason Sizemore
2.0
A witchy librarian meets a young boy from a rough background who desperately needs to escape.
I think your enjoyment of this will be dependent on a) whether you've worked in a library before and b) if you have, how you feel about that job. There's a lot of magic in the books feeling in this story and I really liked the idea of books knowing who their readers are or being smug about getting read vs getting dusty on the shelf. But I found myself getting annoyed, as someone who's working in libraries and facing burn-out, at some of the witchiness of the librarian. As much as I'm able to recognize that it's fiction, it felt too conveniently simple for the librarian to step in and fix things for the boy. That annoyance made it difficult for me to get sucked into the story.
I think your enjoyment of this will be dependent on a) whether you've worked in a library before and b) if you have, how you feel about that job. There's a lot of magic in the books feeling in this story and I really liked the idea of books knowing who their readers are or being smug about getting read vs getting dusty on the shelf. But I found myself getting annoyed, as someone who's working in libraries and facing burn-out, at some of the witchiness of the librarian. As much as I'm able to recognize that it's fiction, it felt too conveniently simple for the librarian to step in and fix things for the boy. That annoyance made it difficult for me to get sucked into the story.