This is a book that is a love letter to libraries, and librarians who quibble over the little details are missing the point.Īnd back to my main point: this is an amazing book. This is a book that every politician in Washington should be forced to read before they even dream of cutting library funding. But REGARDLESS of all that: who in the hell cares? My husband was a surgeon for forty years, and if he dismissed out of hand every TV show, movie and book that didn't play true to life on medical details, he'd never have enjoyed anything. This is not a real person who took a job away from a real qualified librarian, for pete's sake. To me, this was sufficiently explained in the book by the boss being drunk and not caring, and being in crisis over losing her children's librarian to cancer when Lucy's resume showed up in her mailbox, and in a very small, isolated town. I even know of two different public libraries where the 'head librarian' (argue if you will about whether that should be her title) has no MLS. Secondly, as a retired school librarian, I need to say this to the librarians on here saying they refuse to like the book because Lucy doesn't have an MLIS: first of all, there ABSOLUTELY ARE libraries, way out in the cornfields, where someone could end up in even an administrative position with nothing more than a BA. (I've been troubled in recent years by the obsession with 'likability', people demanding that their characters make good choices or become better people in the book, but I digress.) Instead she chose to make her narrator just as flawed as Ian's parents, and that's what makes it a great story. I'd love to see these same readers' responses to Crime and Punishment! Let's give the author a little credit here: if she'd wanted to make this a clear moral case, it would have been so easy (maybe too easy) to do that. It seems I had to join to do that! First, it's odd to see so much moral judgment of a character in a book where the very first line is 'I might be the villain of this story.' It's almost as if other readers have conflated the author with the narrator, and figure that if in the end the narrator is culpable then it must have failed as a book. I do read reviews on Goodreads from time to time, usually after I finish a book (oddly), and two things were bothering me about the responses to this book, and I felt compelled to respond to them. It is one of those ones that makes you want to grab strangers on the street and force them to read it while you watch their face to see their reaction. Well I'll be honest: I joined Goodreads just so I could review this book.

The borrower by rebecca makkai