Her dad enchants Ian with an elaborate story about starting up a chocolate factory when he was a little kid in the U.S.S.R. They stay for a few days in a luxury condo in Chicago where Lucy spent her childhood. She and Ian pool what little money they have, stock up on junk food and set off to - where? Their trip strongly resembles Dorothy’s journey with her friends to find the wizard. And so Lucy drifts into the life of a kidnapper. He asks Lucy to give him a ride to his grandmother’s house - his grandmother who lives somewhere. He still tells goofy jokes and conjures up plays on words. The few physical scars Ian carries are frightening and worrisome, but none of this would allow Lucy to do anything particularly outrageous.īut then Ian runs away. Even at this point, she’s probably within her rights. Ian’s mother has probably enrolled him in this dubious program. Although Lucy hadn’t noticed, the head librarian rather quaintly points out Ian as “that little homosexual boy.” And there’s a self-styled religious-sexual expert, Bob Lawson, roaming the neighborhood in a van he calls the Bobmobile, running a program guaranteed to turn gay boys into straight ones. But the situation is complicated by a couple of other issues. Parents certainly have the right to control their children’s reading habits, or at least give it their best shot. Adult Content Matter Weaponry the Theory of Evolution Halloween Roald Dahl, Lois Lowry, Harry Potter, and similar authors.”

Ian’s mother, a fundamentalist Christian who rarely visits the library, sails in one day and hands Lucy a disconcerting list of what Ian shouldn’t be allowed to read: “Witchcraft/Wizardry Magic Satanism/ Occult Religions, etc. His name is Ian Drake, and the other librarians like him a lot because of the uncomfortable fact that if you’re mad about books, there’s probably something missing, something unpleasant or fearsome in the real world you find yourself living in. Into Lucy’s pleasant life comes a loud-voiced goofball of a kid who loves the library, loves Lucy and loves the entire world of books.

Lucy’s main drama has been declaring her financial independence from her domineering, charming, utterly immoral Russian immigrant father. Until now, her life has been peaceful and uneventful, her various boyfriends good-natured but unimportant. Lucy Hull, the narrator of Rebecca Makkai’s first novel, “The Borrower,” is a children’s librarian in Hannibal, Mo. Have you ever stood in a grocery line where the young mother in front of you gives her kid a gratuitous whack or asks, “Do you really want to be fatter than you already are?” What do you do? How do you cope with the cruelty? And worse, more subtle and sad, what if the mean parent seems sincerely concerned about the child’s welfare or even the child’s immortal soul?

The borrower by rebecca makkai