The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai (2011)

I don't remember where I heard about this book, but it was on some list of books about librarians. We didn't have it, so I requested it through MeLCat (a Michigan library system) from Frankenmuth. Lucy Hull is a children's librarian in a small town in Missouri, and her favorite patron is Ian, a boy who likes to read voraciously, is curious about everything, but who's mother is very conservative and want to limit his reading. His parents also think he may be gay and send him to course to cure him of it. One morning Lucy finds Ian camping out in the library, and takes him for a ride, which turns into a long road trip.

I loved the library setting, the librarianly dedication to feeding fertile minds, the quirky staff at the library, the frequent references to good books. I didn't quite understand what Lucy thought she was doing by running away with Ian. I totally understand her motivation, getting this child away from a mentally abusive family for a while to think over his options, but this was a bit drastic. She knew it was wrong, would be considered kidnapping, so she took the precautions of a fugitive - paying only in cash, etc. But it seemed neither Ian or she knew what the goal of the road trip was to be. They seemed to just keep driving on to the next place. Being a long distance driver, it seemed to me the trip took longer than it should. I figured they covered about 1500 miles to the final destination. For me that would be a two day drive, but then most don't have the patience to sit in a car that long, and they did need to do some exploring along the way, and I guess it worked for the plot.

The goal was to help Ian become stronger and realize that adults are not always right, and that he can think for himself: "It was the universal revelation of adolescence, that the adults around you do not have all the answers ... But in Ian it was more than a simple disillusionment. It might well be what would save his life."(p. 288) But there is a second plot line, the one of growth for Lucy herself, and her own disillusionment about her father and his past (he was from Russia). She ended figuring out some things about her own life, and that is always a good thing.

The epilogue was different than most books, a bit quirky, musings on how to catalog this book, herself, with the last paragraphs meant for those who feel they have to read the last page early. (When does one feel tempted to read the last page? You can't do it before you begin the book, because you don't even know what it is about, who the characters are. So it must be at some point, when you are drawn into the story enough, that you want to know if it will end well. I don't regularly read the last page, but sometimes I do, and I did in this book.) Yes, I like books about librarians!