Name: Librarian The
Rating: 3.277777777777778 (9 reviews)
ISBN: 9780241321737

Salley Vickers

Sylvia Blackwell, a young woman in her twenties, moves to East Mole, a quaint market town in middle England, to start a new job as a children's librarian. But the apparently pleasant town is not all it seems. Sylvia falls in love with an older man - but it's her connection to his precocious young daughter and her neighbours' son which will change her life and put them, the library and her job under threat. How does the library alter the young children's lives and how do the children fare as a result of the books Sylvia introduces them to?

Librarian The

Moray Lyle McIntosh

A rather average tale of small-town, rural life in the 1950s. It’s a pleasant enough read but neither the characters nor the writing offered anything fresh or new, even the centrality of the library couldn’t save it and the repeated references to I Capture the Castle left me wondering if the author was aiming for her own version of this classic but she failed to re-create the humour and charm by rather a wide margin. I honestly can’t pinpoint a single thing about it that could be classed as “subversive”. It may have affairs, banned books and children straining against convention but it doesn’t do anything original with them.

Several of the themes were a little tired, the class struggles, small-town gossip and obstructive locals and heaven save me from post-war plots where young, mousy ingénues are silly enough to get involved with married men and their sob stories. I quite liked teenagers Sam and Lizzie and the exuberant twins but even they were only just enough to hold my interest until the end. The one person who struck me as really interesting was Flee Crake but she had far too little time on the page and rather than exploring this interesting character she was relegated to a convenient plot device to solve a problem and did little else. Several of the peripheral characters alluding to pasts and stories that seemed frankly more interesting than the main vein with its tedious quasi-romance and convoluted dramas about the library and the secondary-school fate of the younger characters. I would have liked to see more of Gwen and Chris.

The sudden shift in the last part was a terrible error of judgement. Skipping fifty years into the future the writing is irritatingly coy about revealing who the returning character is, an odd decision because I couldn’t bring myself to care. This epilogue is so brief (and yet too long) that it seems obvious that Sally Vickers wasn’t sure what to do with it but felt compelled to tie up all the loose ends and tell us exactly what happened to all the characters we left in 1959. It’s painfully basic storytelling and a reason why this kind of flash-forward epilogue is never a good idea.

Joline Hordijk

Megan Paterson

*A Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller* 'Vickers sees with a clear eye and writes with a light hand; she's a presence worth cherishing in the ranks of modern novelists.' Philip Pullman In 1958, Sylvia Blackwell, fresh from one of the new post-war Library Schools, takes up a job as children's librarian in a run down library in the market town of East Mole. Her mission is to fire the enthusiasm of the children of East Mole for reading. But her love affair with the local married GP, and her befriending of his precious daughter, her neighbour's son and her landlady's neglected grandchild, ignite the prejudices of the town, threatening her job and the very existence of the library with dramatic consequences for them all. The Librarian is a moving testament to the joy of reading and the power of books to change and inspire us all. 'Underneath the delightful patina of nostalgia for post-War England, there are stern and spiky questions about why we are allowing our children to be robbed of their heritage of story.' Frank Cottrell Boyce 'Vickers has a formidable knack for laying open the human heart' Sunday Times

Librarian The

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