The Borrower

Rebecca Makkai is also a new author for me, but my friend Anne Z. said she was sure I would go for this book. And indeed the characters are very engaging, primarily Lucy Hull, who is filling in on a rather long-term basis as a children's librarian at the public library in Hannibal, Missouri, and her most bibliophilic patron, 10-year old Ian Drake. It turns out that Ian may be exhibiting behavior that leads a lot of people to think he is gay and his parents are so phobic and fundamentalist that they not only forbid his reading of anything to do with wizardry, adult content or evolution but they have signed him up for "Reboot Camp," run by the Reverend Bob Lawson's Glad Hearts Ministry, designed to help strays return to the (heterosexual) fold. Lucy is enraged but limits herself to surreptitiously checking out books for Ian in her own name until one fateful morning. She arrives early at the library to find Ian has spent the night, is running away, and is begging her to drive him to his grandmother's house--even though Lucy knows he does not have a grandmother. Crazily enough, she gets in the car with him and they begin driving, with her thinking at every point that she will take him home, as soon as she has inoculated him, somehow, to stand up to the anti-gay regimen to which he is being subjected. But they never manage to have that conversation and they keep driving--all the way to Vermont and the Canadian border--and it turns out that Lucy is running away as well. Is Lucy a kidnapper or the kidnappee, a savior or an intrusive busybody. Eventually Ian decides to return home. I felt a bit let down at the end. Lucy manages to sneak a list of "must read" books past Ian's mother and then goes on her way, hoping Ian will triumph and most readers will be left hoping, too. Lucy moves on to another job and reconciles herself somehow to a past and a parent she doesn't fully understand. What shines through this narrative is Lucy's faith that books can save people, and since I believe that, too, it wasn't a bad journey to take with Lucy and Ian.