A charming close relationship between a young librarian (Lucy) and a precocious young boy (Ian) that revolves around the library and books. Lucy treats the library and books as if they were her own. This young boy, Ian, loves books; is addicted to books and to the library and looks to Lucy for suggesting good books for him to read. Unfortunately his mother is not keen on him reading certain genres, so either the boy or the librarian, devise ways to smuggle out his books (in his pants, under his

This author can NOT be a parent, first of all. To create this kind of storyline...However her character (can't recall her name now)obtained this 10 year old boy purposefully or not - just the fact that she didn't call his parents from moment ONE makes me feel like jail is a proper sentence for her. As a mom, I would have had an AGONIZING week wondering what kind of perv or loon had my kid; along with all kinds of horrendous images. Unforgivable. Then...it was suggested in the beginning that the

I’m not sure yet why I didn’t love this book as much as I expected to. Perhaps it’s because I never have read Mary Norton’s The Borrowers , and therefore couldn’t appreciate the parallels that Makkai was making.The main character, Lucy Hull, is a children’s librarian, who becomes overly concerned with the welfare of her favourite library patron, Ian Drake. Being in library work myself, I usually adore books involving libraries and librarians. This one also references many books of childhood, ano...

I wanted to read this book because the blurb said it was about a children's librarian. Well, that wasn't exactly true. The protagonist is a twenty-something college grad who happens to work in the children's section of a small town library, but she has not actually had any professional training (no masters degree, in other words).I couldn't see that she had had any prior experience of any kind with children, so one wonders how she landed this job. (There must have been a dearth of applicants and...

Well I'll be honest: I joined Goodreads just so I could review this book. 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. But more about that in a minute...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 seems I had to join to do that! First, i...

Cool, dramatic, spontaneous and hilarious!Come, hop on and just enjoy the drive... don`t waste time judging or finding the critic within yourself.“Isn't it what all librarians strive toward, at least in the movies and cliches? Silence, invisibility, nothing but a rambling cloud of old book dust.”This book is about the crazy road trip story of Lucy Hull, a children's librarian from Hannibal, Missouri and 10-year-old Ian Drake. I started this book thinking it was about books, libraries and librari...

Oh, where to start? I just couldn't buy into the premise no matter how much I really tried. When you have a book that essentially a two-hander, you need to like both characters - Lucy just irritated me too much for that to happen. Which is too bad because the book parodies and games are charming.Lucy is the head children's librarian at a small public library in Missouri, reporting to an alcoholic director, living over a small theatre, and no real direction in life. One of the children that comes...

Let me say it straight out: this book isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Those who cherry-pick the Bible – who ignore the parts that say “you can’t ever eat pork or shellfish, and women should cover their heads, and you can’t plant two crops in the same field”, yet laser in on two little verses that may or may not imply that God doesn’t like gays – will likely be offended.Certainly, the existence of those who believe not in absolute rights but in their particular absolute right offends the...

Here's the first thing that people should understand about The Borrower: it's not realistic. Here's the second: that doesn't matter. Allow yourself to go with it for a moment before condemning Lucy for driving away from Hannibal, Missouri with Ian Drake, or doubting that she would do it in the first place. I just don't feel that author Rebecca Makkai was expecting us to believe that any 26 year-old librarian would go on a week-long secret road trip with a 10 year-old child, even one whose parent...

Reading The Borrower is like having a long sit-down with an old friend, full of asides and references you're supposed to know. It's great!I could pick this book apart, if I wanted to: Lucy is not a believable character: She's super-smart, but has no career plans, gorgeous, but doesn't date or have friends, "falls into" a job that requires an advanced degree she doesn't have, and allows herself to be led into a criminal act by a ten year old boy.BUTIt is a fantastically enjoyable read. Makkai giv...

What a delightful book! It concerns a sort of listless librarian and her friendship--and sudden adventure--with a 10-year-old boy, who might be gay, to the horror of his very Christian parents. There are references to all kinds of children's books which all readers who were bookworms as children will have fun recognizing and remembering. What I loved most about this book is the manner in which it pays homage to those formative reading experiences, and acknowledges that for many of us, books cont...

I was drawn to this book by its bookish theme and by the author whose "Great Believers" I loved. But a road trip that is an "accidental abduction" of a 10 year old boy by a librarian was not amusing to me but anxiety producing. I could not relax into the flippant tone of this book at all.

Oh how I wanted to love this book! It has so many things that I adore: libraries, quirkiness, a book reference on almost every page, a journey, a possibly-gay 10 year-old boy, various unrequited loves...The book turned out to be grounded more in farce than in reality, which would have been ok except that the protagonist was so dull you couldn't really root for her, and in a farce, you need to have some attachment to the main character in order to swallow all the unrealistic situations and coinci...

Debut novelist and elementary schoolteacher Rebecca Makkai combines a wily, madcap road trip with socially poignant conundrums and multiple themes in this coming-of-age story about a twenty-six-year-old children's librarian, Lucy Hull, and a ten-year-old precocious book lover, Ian Drake, in fictional Hanibal, Missouri. (Guess who is coming-of-age? Answer: not so evident.)Lucy isn't entirely sure that she's a reliable narrator--part of our reading pleasure is to figure that out. She tells us in t...

Boy, did I love this book. Lucy Hull is a children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri. In general, she lacks drive—she keeps doing her job because she enjoys it but she doesn't really want to pursue anything else, she keeps personal relationships at arm's length, and she doesn't care that her life is fairly boring. But all that changes as she deals with one of the library's most voracious readers, 10-year-old Ian Drake. When Ian's evangelical mother tells Lucy she only wants Ian reading books tha...