Rating: WARTY!
Subtitled Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks, this audiobook sounded like fun, and I love librarians, so I felt I owed the profession a review of this or something like it, but in the end, I didn't love this book for several reasons. I had hoped for something much better.
The first and foremost of the problems I had with it was that despite being published only a year or so ago (as of this review) the book seemed obsessed with antiques and classics rather than addressing any of the newer material that's out there. I don't have a lot of reverence for the classics - certainly no more than for modern works and certainly not simply because they're so-called classics! Yes, it did cover some more recent material but very, very, little.
Another issue I had with it was that, for having been written by a librarian, it wasn't very good. There were some interesting 'letters' and some outright laugh-out-loud moments in it, but those were few and far between and the more I listened to this, the more I found myself skipping sections either because they were boring or because I had zero interest in the book being addressed. It felt like anyone could have written this, no librarianship required.
Worse than this was the vulgar language. I have no problem with that in a novel. People use foul language in real life so there's no reason at all it should not be depicted in a novel, but it felt completely out of place in this work, and it really grated when she used it.
For these reasons I cannot commend this as a worthy read. My apologies to librarians everywhere; I can;t speak for them, but I doubt this author speaks for very many of them!
