With her gripping novel The Astral Library, historical novelist Kate Quinn (The Briar Club) takes a flying leap into literary fantasy, creating a world where desperate bibliophiles can find literal sanctuary--and, occasionally, dragons--in the pages of a book.
Tough-talking former foster kid Alix Watson is an expert at escaping into her favorite stories. But when her life falls apart on a single terrible day, she steps through a door at the Boston Public Library and finds herself in the Astral Library, which offers book lovers the chance to actually live inside the volumes. Alix, eager to learn, volunteers to assist the librarian as a page. But when the library comes under sinister attack, Alix must marshal her forces--including handsome costumier Beau and a ragtag band of fellow readers--to protect the library and its patrons.
Quinn's narrative combines a delightful collection of stories and settings (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) with wry asides about technology via a temperamental tablet that changes its own password and a passel of library ghosts still struggling to conquer their TBR lists. Both the novel's villains and its eventual ending skewer modern bureaucracy while asking important questions about the role of libraries in a free society. And, as in all good stories that go off the map, there are dragons.
Perceptive, compassionate, and bursting with literary catnip, The Astral Library is a highly entertaining magical caper and a moving tribute to the power of a good story. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams