Name: The Borrower
Rating: 3.375 (12 reviews)
ISBN: 9780670022816

Rebecca Makkai

When her favorite patron, a book-loving ten-year-old, runs away from overbearing parents who force him to attend anti-gay classes with a celebrity pastor, children's librarian Lucy Hull flees with the boy and discovers that they are being pursued by an anonymous adversary.

The Borrower

When her favorite patron runs away from overbearing parents who force him to attend anti-gay classes, children's librarian Lucy Hull flees with the ten-year-old boy and discovers that they are being pursued by an unknown enemy.

Nikolay Bachiyski

The book found me in a small bookshop in Santa Cruz, recommended by the staff. Not that it’s surprising that bookshop staff will recommend a book about a librarian. Or that they will recommend a book telling an obviously fictional story, in which books save lives or at least make them a little better.

Daryl Houston

I enjoyed this quick read more than a 3-star review really suggests, though it didn't feel like a 4-star book to me in the end. The premise of the story, or at least the irresponsible way the main character plunges forward, seemed pretty implausible, but then the book is to some degree embracing this, as it is a book about stories and how they're made (even if implausible, as many of the best are) and what in them appeals to us. So I was able to suspend disbelief and annoyance and enjoy the other main character and the different story modes the author adopted as she wrote this story about stories. I liked it, a fair bit -- but didn't love it.

Elizabeth Scott

In this delightful, funny and moving first novel, a librarian and a young boy obsessed with reading take to the road. Lucy Hull, a 26-year-old children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both kidnapper and kidnapped when her favourite patron, 10-year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucy's help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly anti-gay classes. Lucy, a rebel at heart beneath her librarian's exterior, stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds Ian camped out in the library after hours, with a knapsack of provisions and an escape plan. Desperate to save him from the Drakes, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked by Ian. The odd pair embark on an improvised road trip from Missouri to Vermont, with ferrets and an inconvenient boyfriend thrown in their path. Along the way, Lucy struggles to make peace with her Russian immigrant father and his fugitive past, and is forced to use his shady connections to escape discovery. But is it just Ian who is running away? Who is the strange man on their tail? And should Lucy be trying to save a boy from his own parents?

The Borrower

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