tmooney42 's review for:

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

4.75

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

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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.