First off, Happy National Library Week, and I hope you rush
to your nearest branch to see what all the great local librarians have in store
for you. We have been sweetening the students with donuts and orange juice,
stimulating their minds with a full library scavenger hunt, and throwing a
weeding party for the art department.
Busy, busy…but I made time to read the perfect book for this
week’s celebration. The Borrower, by Rebecca Makkai, contains a main
character who is a children’s librarian in the moderately sized town of
Hannibal, Missouri. Lucy Hull, all of 26-years-old, is a college educated
single chick doing her best to make ends meet without help from her parents.
Lucy is a hipster librarian. She lives above an active
community theatre and is unable to make noise or even flush the toilet between
the hours of 6 pm to 10pm. This affords her all the time in the world to read. I
got a kick out of her tendency to “name drop” children’s book titles and
authors throughout the story.
The public library in Hannibal is similar to the thousands
of libraries in our nation. Readers come in all sizes and abilities. In Lucy’s
seven years of hard library labor she has made quite a lot of reading friends,
but her favorite is 10-year-old Ian Drake.
Young Ian is a reader of everything, but unfortunately his
mother limits his taste with a little Christian censorship. He is not to be
given books with witchcraft, wizards, magic, Satanism, adult content, weaponry,
evolution, Halloween, nor “Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, Harry Potter, and similar
authors.” She hasn’t a clue that Harry Potter is a character and not an author.
A bond grows between Lucy, the supplier of illicit books on
the list, and Ian, the voracious reader who sneaks them under his shirt while
checking out approved “decoy” books. It truly is a symbiotic relationship that
goes awry when Ian runs away from home and into the back of the children’s book
stacks.
In a confused moment of wanting to help Ian but knowing he
needs his family, she sets him up in the back of her car to transport him to
his parents. Tantrums are thrown and she keeps driving her beat up, baby-blue
Toyota until she crosses a bridge into St. Louis.
How will they ever get out of this mess? Rush to find this
book at your local library and thank a haggard librarian for feeding your own
reading addiction.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
The Borrower (copy)
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