This was a nice read. A bit misleading of a title—it’s less about the library than you’d think—but nice.
As with many three-and-a-half-star books for me that are just good reads—nothing out of the ordinary or particularly noteworthy, but nothing worth criticizing either—it’s pretty hard to drum up a review. Especially since I have forgotten all the characters’ names and just had to look them all up.
Through a series of charmingly contrived circumstances, sixteen-year old Tom and seventy-two year old Maggie become friends through the library, and the book follows both of them in how the relationship slowly changes them. They sort of adopt each other as pseudo-family. Tom’s mother is dead, and his dad is emotionally unavailable, in addition to money troubles. Maggie doesn’t have a family at all, it seems she once had a son.
There’s a lot of mentions of specific books in here, as part of Tom’s journey is to learn to love reading (and he reads all over the place, starting with a ton of romance novels). There’s also a lot of loving descriptions of food, and quite a few animals (Maggie lives on a farm).
I suppose the main point here is that the library acts as a central place for the community the way that other places can’t, but that part of the book really was the weakest by far. The faux-grandmother/grandson relationship between Maggie and Tom is really the heart of the book, not the library, even when the plot focuses on saving the library it still didn’t feel quite as important as I thought it should.
[3.5 stars]