This book could possibly be your dessert!
I should have liked, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but I didn’t, and I’m unsure why. Robin Sloan is a great writer. His main character, Clay, is a likable guy who works at an unusual bookstore that is open twenty-four hours a day and gets few customers. The few who come during his shift in the middle of the night, don’t buy books but only borrow them, and the books they take are unknown. As the story unfolds, the reader discovers a secret society all searching for peculiar clues to solve an elusive puzzle–all of this is golden, must-read stuff! Only, it wasn’t. It felt as if it ended with a shrug over my expectant arms thrown over my head in victory.
Sloan’s book was on the New York Times Bestseller list, and it received significant endorsements so the issue may not be that this book isn’t good, but rather that I’m too old for this Millennial fairytale. Read it, and you decide. It may be just what you’re looking for!