What an intriguing title! I always love the meta-aspect of a book about books, or bookstores. This book straddles the line between a very modern YA narrative voice, heavy on technology in the plot, and the mystique of hidden, ancient knowledge.
The protagonist, Clay, is a kid between jobs who gets hired to work the night shifts at a bookstore in a big city–but it’s hidden in a spot that customers rarely stumble upon. They carry some famous titles, but also a back catalog of ancient, one-of-a-kind volumes rented out to a strange clientele. Mr. Penumbra, the little old man who owns the place, has just a couple of rules: Clay should keep careful records of all the people who rent from the “way back list,” down to details about their appearance, and he is never to investigate books on said list, himself, or he will be immediately fired. Already this sets up expectations of magic or secret powers…
Then one day, a cute girl who works at Google comes in. There’s a bit of romance there, but the point of the story is more that Clay, Kat, and Clay’s friends eventually investigate the books anyway, find that there’s a code involved in some of them that they can’t read, and they’re determined to use supercomputers to both scan the Wayback list into the cloud, and also to crack the code. Mr. Penumbra, it turns out, isn’t against this at all–in fact, it seems he was using reverse psychology on Clay, in order to get him to do just that.
I do feel like the book was an elaborate setup that turned out to be much ado about nothing, though. There were constant, loud hints of the supernatural throughout the book that never materialized. It felt a little bit like a bait-and-switch.
My rating: ***1/2
Language: there was some but not horrible
Sexual content: nothing too overt
Violence: none
Political content: some but not horrible
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