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Mood: Happy ]
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Currently: Listening to Extra Hot Great ]
In my travels through the library led me to this book:
While out walking one night, Alexandra comes across a bookmobile that is full of every book that she has ever read. This library of Alexandra fascinates her, and after she leaves, she spends years looking for it again. Alexandra begins to isolate herself, becoming obsessed with reading, wanting to impress the librarian with her choices. Eventually she becomes a librarian herself, and each time she encounters the library she is amazed at how many books it contains.
This is a beautifully illustrated picture book, that the author, Audrey Niffenegger (famous for the Time Traveller’s Wife), calls a graphic novel. If there is one flaw with this book, it is the characterization of Alexandra, a reader and eventually librarian, as alone and desperate with only one choice at the end on how to join the mystical library. This is not a book about how incredibly uplifting and enriching reading can be. Instead readers are loners with suicidal tendencies, which we are not.
Niffengger missed the mark here. She wants to produce a piece that makes us stop and think about who we read for and why we read, instead becomes a slap in the face of the very readers she is trying to appeal to. What would have happened had she used Alexandra’s reading as a way for her to grow, find a better, more self-fufilling relationship and contribute to society. The end could have been relatively the same, but her readers would have been more satisfied.
Interesting concept, but Niffengger’s depressing plot turn ruins what would have been a perfect book.