The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai Book Review
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For my first video, I decide to review an amazing book.
You can buy "The Borrower" here: http://www.amazon.com/ Borrower-Novel-Rebecca-Makkai/ dp/0670022810
Here's Rebecca Makkai's website: http://rebeccamakkai.com/
Tags: the borrower by rebecca makkai book review TheFacelessCritic
Added: 11 months ago
From: TheFacelessCritic
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[scene opens with the Faceless Critic (a young lady wearing a multicolored ski mask) speaking directly to the camera]
FACELESS CRITIC: Lucy, who's the main character, is really relatable and just really cool, and just a good-hearted person. She's really good at heart, but she kind of has, like, a moral dilemma throughout the story, because she is kidnapping a boy, but his parents are just horrible.
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FACELESS CRITIC: Lucy breaks every librarian stereotype in existence. She's twenty six years old, she's funny, she's cool, she isn't going like "Shhh!" all the time.
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FACELESS CRITIC: Ian, who is the boy in this story, he's ten. His parents are like evangelical Christians, and his mother actually gives Lucy a list, saying like he can't read any books about magic or any witchcraft. He can't read anything that's, y'know, "against God." The stereotypical, like, overbearing Christian parents.
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FACELESS CRITIC: A lot of the adults in this book think that Ian is gay, which is ridiculous. Like, there's one line where Lucy says "He's ten years old, I doubt he's anything-sexual!" Because one woman says, "Oh, that little homosexual boy" ...
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FACELESS CRITIC: His parents are so scared at the thought of him being gay that, in fact, they enroll him in this like anti-gay class ... that's like trying to help the like "sexually confused" brothers and sisters of the church or something. It, it's bull[bleep] basically.
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FACELESS CRITIC: And so Ian gets mad at his parents, and he runs away. And Lucy opens up the library in the morning, and she finds him hiding under the desk with like ... You know those things that are like a stick with the bandana tied on the end of it and have stuff in it? That was his backpack!
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FACELESS CRITIC: Ian kinda like, basically tricks Lucy into taking him on this wild adventure ...
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FACELESS CRITIC: They drive through all these places, they go and stay with Lucy's parents for a few days. Lucy's father and mother used to live in the USSR, and her father is like a rebel. They stay with a family who's friends with her father, who have like a really hard to pronounce Russian last name.
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FACELESS CRITIC: One thing I really liked about the book was that some of the chapters are actually parodies of childrens' books. Like, there's one chapter that was a parody of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." It was like they ate, it was like "Lucy and Ian ate blah blah blah blah blah" but they kept driving, but they were still hungry. If you've ever read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" before.
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FACELESS CRITIC: There was also a parody of "The House That Jack Built," but it was "The Mess That Lucy Made."
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FACELESS CRITIC: They meet a lot of interesting people, and go to a lot of cool places in this book, and it's just funny throughout the whole thing.
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FACELESS CRITIC: There's not a moment of this book that I did not find entertaining. There was no long drawn-out boring parts, every part of this was interesting.
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FACELESS CRITIC: Highly recommended, five stars out of five!
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From amazon.com:
Lucy Hull, a young children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both a kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten- year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucy's help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly antigay classes with celebrity Pastor Bob. Lucy, a rebel at heart beneath her librarian exterior, stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds Ian camped out in the library after hours with a knapsack of provisions and an escape plan. Desperate to save him from Pastor Bob and the Drakes, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked by Ian. The odd pair embarks on a improvised road trip from Missouri to Vermont, with ferrets, an inconvenient boyfriend, and upsetting family history thrown in their path. Along the way, Lucy struggles to make peace with her Russian immigrant father and his fugitive past, and is forced to use his shady connections to escape discovery. But is it just Ian who is running away? Who is the strange man who seems to be on their tail? And should Lucy be trying to save a boy from his own parents?
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From blogspot.com:
Lucy Hull is twenty-six and unmarried, a children's librarian in a fictional Hannibal, Missouri. The only child of a Russian immigrant father and a Jewish American mother, Lucy grew up in Chicago, bookish, very slightly rebellious, the inheritor of genetic guilt on both sides of the family. Always a little ashamed of her father's dubious business dealings, she fled to Missouri after college as a way to distance herself from her parents and their probably tainted money.
Despite sometimes viewing herself as a bit of a cliche, Lucy likes her job and the mission it provides her. She runs the Chapter Book Hour reading group every Friday afternoon (they're reading Roald Dahl's deliciously subversive Matilda as the story begins), she oversees the summer reading program, she passes out candy on Halloween, with double candy and a bookmark to any kid dressed as a character from a book. She lives in an apartment above a theater amid towering stacks of books. Her conversation is peppered with book quotes and references, and she loves nothing more than recommending just the right book. Her best and favorite library client is a loudly precocious and somewhat flamboyant ten-year-old called Ian Drake, a voracious and sophisticated reader.
When Ian's mom approaches Lucy at her desk in the library one afternoon to complain gently about Lucy's having given him Tuck Everlasting (about a family who's found the gift of immortality and the choice a young girl must make), Lucy is perplexed. Then Ian's mom requests that Ian only be allowed to check out books with "the breath of God in them," ignores Lucy's response that although she herself must allow her patrons full access to all the books it would certainly be Mrs. Drake's right to choose Ian's books for him, and finally whips out a list of topics ("Witchcraft/Wizardry; Magic; Satanism/Occult Religions, etc.; Adult Content Matter; Weaponry; The Theory of Evolution; Halloween; Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, Harry Potter, and similar authors") which she'd like Ian to avoid. What else can Lucy do but nod and say she understands (though never actually agreeing to these terms)?
Not long after this encounter, Lucy learns that Ian is attending weekly sessions with a man who calls himself Pastor Bob. Pastor Bob is "formerly" gay, now born again, married to a reformed lesbian, and on a mission to de-gay the rest of the world. So really, what can she do, several months later, when she arrives at work early one morning to discover that Ian has run away from home with a backpack full of power bars and a hobo bag on a stick? She finds herself, against her better judgment but seemingly without a choice, on the lam with Ian. Lucy's not exactly a kidnapper...but she really should know better. And yet, though compelled by forces she can't quite bring herself to comprehend, Lucy has never seen Ian more gleeful, and the thought of getting him out of Pastor Bob's clutches--though the two of them never, ever talk about it--keeps her driving.
I couldn't stop comparing Lucy and Ian's journey to that of Ava and the Bird Man in Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, released earlier this year. Both are unconventional and discomfiting pairings of unrelated adult and child companions on journeys seemingly directed by the child. But, where the reader's discomfort with Ava's journey never for a moment lets up, and it ends much as one fears it will, that of Lucy and Ian is one of wholesome, if weird, discovery (and sometimes joy). In The Borrower Rebecca Makkai manages to write from Lucy's guilt-ridden, self-flagellating perspective while maintaining a light--and frequently hilarious--tone. Even Lucy's frequent moments of doubt and dread are balanced out by the spot-on deftness of the narrative, complete with passages written in the mode of authors from Eric Carle to Margaret Wise Brown to Lewis Carroll and beyond. The Borrower is a book for readers, for lovers of personal freedom and the beauty of being oneself, whoever that self may be. If you get all the book references ("Where's Papa going with that ax? said Fern"), then so much the better, but you'll enjoy this wonderful novel either way.
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