The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

Gut Instinct Rating - 4

Characters - 4

Believability for type and topics - 2

Similarity to other books - 4

Writing Style - 3.5

Excitement Factor - 3.5

Story Line - 4

Title Relevance - 2

Dust Jacket Art - 3

To read or not to read? If you enjoy books about books and mystery's, this is definitely your book. But if you're not someone who enjoys an endless story with many answers, I would pass.

Movie? None

Goodreads users gave this book a 3.46. I think it was more deserving of a 3.33.

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Published on January 1, 2011

Pages: 234

Publishing Company: Viking Publishing

Number of books by author: 15 Novels

Genre: Fiction, Adult Fiction, Contemporary, Books About Books

This is a book that I would recommend, but only to a specific audience. This book was good, and I laughed out loud a few times - but it was the type of book that requires two things - the right mood, and the right reader. I feel like this book could escape someone's interest if they didn't care for mystery-like novels.

The characters were well done, but I just wanted more. I wanted more about Ian's parents, because we never got any information about the dad (was there a dad? Was he as conservative as the mom? If there wasn't a dad, is that why the mom reacted the way she did?) and I felt like that hole in the story could've been filled with one sentence. But we focused primarily on the mom, but her presence wasn't filled well. She was sporadic, and when she was involved in the story, it wasn't clear how close her and Ian were, since often the babysitter's name was mentioned or re-mentioned in passing.

The believability really killed me in this book. This is the crime-junkie in me coming out, and that's what really hurt me throughout this process. The story was missing some crucial moments... say for example, an amber alert was never called out for a missing 10-year old boy?! And furthermore, this book was written 6 years ago in 2011, so it's not as if this book was written in the 80s and the technology isn't around. Easily, the technology that would've been needed to track this boy, could've been brought in quickly -even for a small town. But it never was, and I felt like this could've added to the story itself, as well as the excitement factor.

It was a unique story, nonetheless. We see a young librarian facing her world of books, and trying to make them a reality for this little boy, Ian. When in reality, she's trying to make him her reality. Maybe the tone of that story line is slighted in the beginning, but it's definitely an interesting idea that Lucy is indeed a psychopath. If nothing else, her odd family history could account for her strange social behaviors. In addition, we know she likes to make lists, but who makes a list with a list of instructions or choices, and then gives them back to themselves? It was an odd thing that was written into the book - these poems, or lists. I didn't really understand the purpose of them, so in general, I skimmed and skipped these few pages of the book. The story was getting a bit repetitive in the middle, anyways, and these little snippets of "personal writing" didn't help alleviate that feeling. Towards the end, we saw more excitement come into play, but it was all very gradual, and there wasn't a moment of true climax. Which led to a serious lack of closure. I would really love to see a novella about where Ian and Lucy ended up - did they reunite? Did he get to live out his personality? All these questions that a writer can answer, and we just got shut out with a "I wish you well, I wish you the best," type of create your own ending.

The title didn't really mesh well with me... someone have any idea what's at play there?