Full Review by Lupe Farkas • Spoiler Free

Books about books are dangerous territory for me.

Give me a library and I am already interested. Give that library secrets, memories and a little impossible magic and, well, you have basically placed a trap in the forest and filled it with Coke Zero.

I am walking straight into it.

And I mean that as a compliment.

This is not fantasy that wants you studying rules, drawing maps and keeping notes about how its magic works. The magic simply exists alongside very human things: grief, friendship, love, memory, loneliness and our strange attachment to places that once made us feel safe.

That worked beautifully for me.

There is something about libraries that people who love them understand without needing it explained.

They are never only rooms containing books.

For some people they are quiet. For others they are escape. They can be somewhere to hide for an afternoon, somewhere to discover a completely different world, or simply somewhere you are allowed to exist without anyone expecting anything from you.

And this book understands that feeling.

Really understands it.

Meg Anderson also lets the story become considerably more emotional than its cosy, bookish exterior initially suggests. There is warmth here, definitely, but the book has teeth underneath it. Grief and trauma are part of the story, as are the complicated ways human beings deal with things they would rather leave locked somewhere in the past.

What I particularly liked is that the book does not seem desperate to prove how clever its magical premise is. It keeps returning to people.

Who we love.

Who we lose.

What we remember.

What we choose to forget.

And what happens when something we thought we had safely packed away decides it would actually like to come back and ruin our Tuesday.

The characters are imperfect enough to feel human, which is always something I prefer. People fail to communicate. They misunderstand each other. They take too long to see things sitting directly in front of them.

Occasionally I wanted certain dots to connect slightly faster.

But then again, readers have the enormous luxury of looking at somebody else’s life from the outside. Everything is much easier when it is not happening to you.

I also appreciated that the story allows friendship, family, romantic love and community to carry equal emotional importance. Romance exists, but this never felt to me like a book desperately trying to drag everything toward a couple and call that the happy ending.

There are many kinds of love here.

And many kinds of loss.

That matters.

I can understand why some readers may wish the magical side went deeper. There is enough mystery in the premise to make you curious about every possible corner of it, and my nosy little reader brain certainly would happily investigate an entire encyclopaedia about magical libraries.

But I think explaining everything would also remove some of the charm.

Sometimes magic works precisely because nobody hands you an instruction manual.

Mostly, though, The Memory of Borrowed Books left me thinking about the relationship between readers and places.

We talk constantly about books changing us.

We talk less about the places where we found them.

The library we visited as children.

The bookstore where we spent money we absolutely did not have.

The chair where we finished something at two in the morning.

The book we borrowed during a terrible month and returned weeks later looking exactly the same even though the person returning it was not.

Maybe that is why the central idea of this book works so well.

It takes something readers already do emotionally and makes it magical.

The Memory of Borrowed Books is warm without being empty, magical without losing its humanity, and emotional without forgetting that there can still be hope after difficult things.

Five stars.

And yes, I would absolutely investigate the mysterious room.

I have apparently learned nothing from literature.