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A review by catherine_the_greatest
The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai
5.0
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.