Which is apt since The Librarian traces the impact an idealistic young Children’s Librarian has on East Mole, the Wiltshire market town she moves to in 1959. So when I flipped to the back of Salley Vickers’ latest novel, I was in for a pleasant surprise because she lists not people but books. To the well-trained eye, these thank-you lists – sometimes spare, sometimes gushing – position their author with merciless precision in the literary ecosystem. No, I’m talking about the acknowledgements.
And I don’t mean turning directly to the last page to find out what happens, either. '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.You know you’ve been a literary critic for too long when you start a book at the end. The Librarian is a moving testament to the joy of reading and the power of books to change and inspire us all. 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. Her mission is to fire the enthusiasm of the children of East Mole for reading. 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. '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
0 kommentar(er)
