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A review by lenaandcalliope
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
adventurous
lighthearted
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.5
Nov 2021:
I picked a copy of this book up for cheap from a thrift store a couple years back and figured it would be a good light carefree read for me considering I just finished something pretty heavy. Potential magical bookstore in San Francisco sure that sounds great and super chill.
In reality this book just irritated me beyond belief, all the characters are obviously written by a white “geek” who feels like he has been marginalized by this aspect of himself- eww. The characters are shallow and they have little depth to their backstories if any (seriously why is the main characters roommate, Matt more interesting than him?). Also aside from the main characters love interest, all the main characters are dudes. The love interest, Kat despite being a “super smart” data viz chick at google is a stereotypical manic pixie dream girl that feels like she fell straight out of the Big Bang theory. She has some serious ‘I’m not like other girls’ syndrome going one and has very little depth to her aside from supporting the main characters fantasies.
I picked a copy of this book up for cheap from a thrift store a couple years back and figured it would be a good light carefree read for me considering I just finished something pretty heavy. Potential magical bookstore in San Francisco sure that sounds great and super chill.
In reality this book just irritated me beyond belief, all the characters are obviously written by a white “geek” who feels like he has been marginalized by this aspect of himself- eww. The characters are shallow and they have little depth to their backstories if any (seriously why is the main characters roommate, Matt more interesting than him?). Also aside from the main characters love interest, all the main characters are dudes. The love interest, Kat despite being a “super smart” data viz chick at google is a stereotypical manic pixie dream girl that feels like she fell straight out of the Big Bang theory. She has some serious ‘I’m not like other girls’ syndrome going one and has very little depth to her aside from supporting the main characters fantasies.
Overall though this book just feels tremendously dated since it relies on the internet (circa 2011/2012) as a main focal point and really idolizes mega companies like google and Facebook as these great all knowing beings of the future. This idea and how the characters talk about google endlessly (seriously I’m curious how many time ‘Google’ is stated directly in the text, I’m think at least hundreds of times) makes it hard to get through this even when other aspects are ok. If youre going into this book looking for true fantasy and magic, I would recommend skipping because it’s definitely tech over magic.
***A TAD BIT OF SPOILERS***
How this book expects readers to side with the main character when the whole solution to the mystery hinges on them giving away the secrets to google before they even they even know anything about the secret society and the books is beyond me. Youre telling me these books may have the secrets to immortality or something and you want to give them to google, TO GOOGLE FOR FREE I MIGHT ADD!?!?? Excuse me what?
Sorry for the mini rant, this book just feels dated in more ways than one and I would not even recommend this to my nerdy d&d friends. Despite being a quick easy read characters are too shallow and the mystery is not built up enough to make you care about them solving it in the end.
@allisonrandoms review really says it all…
“I think my own knowledge of OCR, data visualization and book-related technology really took away from enjoyment of this; all of these elements are presented as high-tech concepts that only the smartest person at Google could understand, when in reality, librarians deal with these concepts on a daily basis and a bookseller should too. The notion that the only way this mystery could be solved is with the help of a genius ingenue from Google made me scoff, both because of the capitalism of it all and because of the seemingly complete misunderstanding about how corporations work. This might have been better if the company at hand was left unnamed, or given a fake name, but it's SO hard for me to read a book that spends 40% of its time praising an objectively evil corporation.”
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexism