This book sucked me in. I had just finished reading The Midnight Library for some reason I can’t remember, and discovered this book, which is, oddly enough, more about a library than a book.

The book starts with a young girl who lives in the middle of a dusty nowhere, a tiny community of people who never go anywhere and subsist mainly on beans. The girl has something no-one else in this community has: curiosity. It’s what makes her pick up a random slip of paper with words on it that she can’t read. And, when a troop of monsters kill the adults in her village and kidnap the children, it’s what makes her try to talk with the leader, and repeat to herself the strange words that it speaks back to her.

When the children are rescued by a troop of humans, it’s what leads her to speak to the leader, to save his life. And, when they reach the city and the rest of the children are assigned to work in the sewers, it’s what leads her to veer off her assigned path and, in response to a gatekeeper’s question, to repeat the words she heard the kidnapper speak. And when she is asked to demonstrate her literacy, to write what she had seen on that piece of paper, although she’s never written anything before and has no idea what it says.

Her curiosity earns her a spot as a librarian’s apprentice, with a future serving the endlessly large library that fills the inside of the mountain on which the city is built. The library is enormous and unfathomable, mainly since their “Dewey decimal system” is redefined by each new head librarian – a political position, to some extent – as a way of preserving their role. As she explores the library, she uncovers it’s secrets and eventually finds a portal into different times in the library and the city. And there she meets the other main character in the book.

He has grown up in the library with a family of other children who have escaped the monsters, by hiding in a contraption that enables them to absorb the contents of whatever book they have brought in with them. For example, one of them has brought in a book about fighting and has become a master fighter. Which is helpful, since the monsters continue to sometimes make their way into their area of the library.

I won’t tell you what happens but it took me completely by surprise, in a good way. This book is incredibly long (~600 pages!) but, once I had started reading, I couldn’t put it down. I kept wondering how it would end because every time the author revealed the answer behind one of the library’s secrets, it revealed another mystery.

The real main character in this book is the library. Like a real library, as you move through the different rooms, new ideas and potentialities become accessible to you. In my freshman year in high school, I had no friends, and I spent all my time before school and during lunch, in the library. I picked a spot in the library, picked up a book, read it, put it back, picked up the book next to it, read that one, put it back, and picked up the next one. I read books I would never have discovered otherwise. When we moved to another town, I did the same thing in the public library downtown. And, in college, I did the same thing at the giant library, discovering an area with popular fiction so old that I couldn’t check it out because it wasn’t in the library’s computer system.

Libraries are marvelous spaces, even when they’re not populated with monsters and mysteries.

My only complaint about this book is that, when I got to the end of the darned book, it turns out it’s the first in a series! 600 pages and I have to read another volume – and possibly more – to figure out how it ends.

It feels like this is a trend by writers: they don’t write a book with an ending, they write a book that leaves the characters hanging. This is, in my mind, just wrong. It feels like a gimmick to get us to buy the next book in the series. But, if you do your job as an author, readers will want to read the next book about that world that you write, even without the cliffhanger.

So cut it out.

I will read the next book in this series – not because I care about the larger world or the characters or the mystery that the author create – because I hope that they’ll end up back in this magical library.