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Oh my, my, my…. The Lost Library. I was so uncertain when I started reading it. Ghosts? Talking cats who liked mice? A little free library? What in the world was I reading? But then I got hooked. I wanted to follow the boy Evan in his sleuthing. By the end …. I smiled. Come along, see why you might smile too!
The Basic Details of The Lost Library
Title: The Lost Library
Author: Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Pages: 224
Intended Audience: 8-12 years
Genre: Children’s fantasy, children’s mystery, cat books, Children’s detective
Reviewed for: Raincoast Books
Available formats: Hardcover, Kindle, Audio
Received: softcover, advanced readers copy
About the Book and Author
The Author
Rebecca Stead is a New York Times bestselling author. Her books have been awarded the Newbery Medal, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Fiction and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. Rebecca lives in New York City where she grew up. Working as a lawyer she decided one day to devour all the children’s books she loved as a child, then she started to write.
Wendy Mass has written more than 25 books and has landed on the the New York Times bestselling list. She and her family live in New Jersey. Some of her hobbies include geocaching, virtual reality, and magic tricks.
The Book
When a mysterious little free library (guarded by a large orange cat) appears overnight in the small town of Martinville, eleven-year-old Evan plucks two weathered books from its shelves, never suspecting that his life is about to change. and so the story unfolds….
Digging Deeper
You will get the story from several different perspectives: Mortimer (the cat), AL (the librarian), and Evan (5th grade sleuth). A good depth was provided for each of these characters, we even got to understand the mice! (what fun!)
The writing is clear, the chapters are short, the action believable. It was so fascinating to watch the free little library grow. Al started to develop clientele! The library becomes instrumental in solving the mystery of the town’s library fire.
My Recommendation
As I stated in my intro, The Lost Library started very slowly, and I kinda wondered what I was getting into with the bouncing around of perspectives. But gradually, once the backstory is established, interest in what happened and is happening now grows.
Evan is a very determined 5th grader with a mystery to solve! What will the end result be? You’ll have to check it out. The ending was not quite what I expected, but in a good way.
Do I think middle schoolers will like it? Some will, some won’t. (like with anybook eh?)
I think they will love Evan and Rafe, real boys with their own unique personalities. Al is a complicated character, and everyone else feels like real people. The cat and the mice are fun additions. The mystery is personal to Evan and it teaches him more about people and his family.
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