Summer Hours at the Robbers Library: A Novel

For those of us who have found refuge in a library, this story will resonate. What would drive a forty-four-year-old librarian to leave her job and marriage in order to take another reference librarian job in an industrial town far past its prime? She has money from her divorce to buy a large ramshackle fixer-upper that is large enough to lose herself in. It is clear that she wants solitude as a first priority. Unfortunately, the town is small enough and desolate enough that the library functions as a quasi-city center. There are four older gentlemen who have a morning meet-up, the library staff, a strange daily computer user, and a teenager. The fifteen-year-old Sunny has been sentenced to library work for the crime of stealing a dictionary–a highly unusual theft for a juvenile delinquent, if that is what she is.

The librarian, Kit Jarvis, is assigned to supervise the teenager. The relationship is not sentimentalized: Kit clearly is not warm and fuzzy with her charge. Somehow, the characters overcome their histories and become a community, if not family. This is a warm and readable book.