A baby girl is left in the library stacks of the children’s department. Four childless librarians have dreams of being mothers. Put these together and what do you have? Library Girl — Polly Horvath’s delightfully quirky 2024 middle-grade novel.
It’s love at first sight for Doris, Taisha, Jeanne-Marie and Lucinda. The women ignore their urge to call the authorities and, instead, keep the baby, naming her Esmeralda and raising “Essie” in their small-town public library. With these unique mothers and piles of books to read, Essie grows up happy and gains a splendid education. But she has no real knowledge of the outside world so, when Essie turns eleven, the mothers decide to let her venture out. While her escapades expand Essie’s world, they also endanger the secret of her upbringing and her beloved mothers’ criminal part in it.
The plot is intriguing and the characters reflect Horvath’s gift of creating charming people (like Oscar, a marvelous elderly library patron) and sometimes ridiculous ones (like Ms. Matterhorn, “a woman so disagreeable that cats leapt into manholes when they saw her coming.”)
I especially appreciate the author’s philosophical asides. Horvath invites readers to think about books and reading and how they connect with love and life and the whole shebang.
I don’t want to give away too much, but here are some peeks:
“Only the storyteller can relate his or her own truth and everyone else should keep their sticky little fingers off it.”
“. . . the only way books let you into the hearts of people is by letting you into their imperfect human hearts as they actually are, not as you, the reader, might wish them to be.”
“Trying to understand was one of the reasons people chose a life in books.”
Words like these really hit home for me.
As a former children’s librarian (and something of a library girl myself), this was a lovely way for me to start the new year. I hope you enjoy it, too.
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Polly Horvath is the author of the Newbery Honor Book Everything on a Waffle, National Book Award winner The Canning Season and many other wonderful books.