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Summer hours at the Robbers Library : a novel
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2018
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New York Times Review
ONCE A THRIVING, industrial mill town, Riverton, N.H., is now down to the Dollar Tree store, a hospital cafeteria (which doubles as the only restaurant) and a budgetstarved old library. That formerly grand building is the hub for the characters in Sue Halpern's new novel, "Summer Hours at the Robbers Library." Here a foursome of male retirees drink coffee and chitchat with unemployed job seekers like Rusty, recently ejected from Wall Street and now on a personal mission that may also be a financial boondoggle. Fifteen-year-old Sunny (short for Solstice) is on hand, doing community service for trying to steal a hardcover dictionary. (She had enough money for the paperback, but paperbacks fall apart.) Finally, there's Kit Jarvis, the reference librarian reluctantly saddled with Sunny's rehabilitation. The catch is that we've met Kit before, in the novel's opening pages, as the voice of a section called "The Marriage Story." That Kit was a witty, ardent college sophomore, brash and knowing about some things and utterly foolish about others. Her eye landed on Calvin Sweeney when her auteur boyfriend needed a "nerdy but attractive enough" guy for his experimental film. In a lineup, she tells us, Cal would be picked "10 times out of 10" as the man who played trombone in the marching band. He's also, quite quickly, her husband. So why has Kit resurfaced in New Hampshire at 44, with a new last name, a stash of money, no visible husband and memories of a clinically significant number of therapy sessions? And what squashed that bold college student into this closely guarded creature? Kit's transformation from live wire to recluse - and her slow emergence from seclusion - is the novel's primary story, but it's hardly the only one, and perhaps not even the most successful. That belongs to the instantly engaging Sunny, the not home-schooled but "no-schooled" daughter of Willow and Steve. They're "alternative" - as in "alternative lifestyle" - not hippies. (Sunny notes dryly that "'1984' is like our family Bible.") Sunny is enmeshed in her parents' worldview, but as she and Kit become closer and her critical sense emerges, she begins to decode the clues she's observed for her entire childhood. The relationship between Kit and Sunny anchors the novel with an admirable lack of sentimentality. Kit accidentally hurts Sunny's feelings; she's businesslike and offhand, ready for the girl to leave. Even when Kit warms up to Sunny, Halpern never lets them fall into mawkishness. Sunny's story is also a welcome change from the doling out of Kit's history with Cal and from present-day Kit, who has tunneled so far into herself she's gone from first-person narration to third. The adult Kit's shell may be enervatingly thick, but the younger Kit provides some of the novel's funniest lines and most discomfiting observations, including an encounter with her future in-laws that's so delicately, productively twisted and inappropriate it filled me with a queasy kind of joy. I only wish Halpern had employed more of these formidable skills in depicting Kit's marriage. As Kit's voice becomes more and more flattened, the depiction of her interactions with Cal loses nuance and texture. That this is presumably deliberate doesn't stop it from feeling like a missed opportunity. Halpern's descriptions of Kit and Cal as "friendly and companionable" and "happily enough married" are clearly intended to show Kit's failure to examine anything under the surface - but the surface itself is too often unexamined as well. Despite these flaws, the novel pays off in sheer plotting. Much as she gave the inlaws a very particular kind of awfulness, Halpern crafts a gratifyingly unexpected, effective answer to the question of what happened between Kit and Cal, with outed secrets and surprising solutions that she plays for minimum melodrama and with realistic warmth. Like Riverton itself, "Summer Hours at the Robbers Library" feels artfully balanced between the reality of loss and a carefully guarded hope for renewal. She has a new last name, a stash of money and memories of clinically significant therapy sessions. MICHELLE WILDGEN'S most recent novel is "Bread and Butter."
Library Journal Review
Back when Andrew Carnegie was building public libraries in every city across America, the town of Riverton, NH, had its own mogul, whose name was Robers, which morphed into "Robbers" through probably equal parts humor and resentment. The town barely hangs on, but the library is now its best-maintained building. Halpern (Dog Walks into a Nursing Home) brings together three oddball characters in this setting and follows them through their encounters with multiple points of view. There is librarian Kit, fresh from therapy following marriage to a controlling monster, Solstice (Sunny), a teenager whose parents live off the grid and hide a secret past, and Rusty, a fugitive from Wall Street. When Sunny is assigned community service at the library after being arrested for shoplifting, she soon connects with Kit and Rusty. -VERDICT Fans of -Felicity Hayes-McCoy's The Library at the Edge of the World will be taken with this beautifully written novel with appealing characters. Given that the author's plot line stretches typical library policy a bit, it's bound to stir some lively book-club discussions about public libraries and their -operations.-Mary K. Bird-Guilliams, Chicago © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
Halpern's clever and touching latest (following A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home) unites a disparate cast of characters who have come to the town library for a variety of reasons. Kit is a reference librarian at the library in Riverton, N.H., a once-booming mill town that has declined since the mills closed. Though residents moved away and shops were shuttered, the library has remained open, and Kit has taken refuge there to escape her irreparably fractured marriage. Kit is mostly a loner who takes solace in books, but she opens up to Sunny, a teen sentenced to community service at the library for stealing a dictionary. Sunny, a bright, inquisitive young woman, makes friends with the regular library patrons and manages to put some cracks in Kit's carefully erected shell as they spend more time together. Sunny also befriends library patron Rusty, an unemployed former employee of a New York investment firm who has come to town to visit the bank where his mother had a secret savings account. Rusty's story line gives the novel a light mystery element, but the characters are the highlight here: their relationships are illuminating and evolve throughout, resulting in a crowd-pleasing tale of friendship. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Halpern (A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home, 2013), a master of precise, warmhearted creative nonfiction and a discerning and sensitive novelist, infuses this tale of derailments and second chances with free-ranging empathy, lithe humor, and penetrating insights into the human psyche. Riverton, New Hampshire, is a financially depleted, increasingly dingy small town grateful for its anchoring library, one of 1,687 constructed by Andrew Carnegie. Folks call it the Robbers Library not only because Carnegie was one of the so-called robber barons who sought redemption through enlightened philanthropy, but also because the man who built the mills that once sustained the town and who also contributed to the library was named Albert Robers, which just begs for that extra b. Speaking of robbery, Sunny, 15, whose birth name is Solstice, and who is being haphazardly raised and no-schooled by secretive, determinedly off-the-grid, Rainbow Gathering parents, is caught attempting to steal a big, fancy dictionary. Intrigued by her unusual crime, the judge comes up with the perfect punishment: Sunny is sentenced to a full summer of community service at the Robbers Library. The library director briskly hands Sunny over to the reference librarian, Kit, who is fairly new in town and hardly thrilled about this disruptive responsibility. Profoundly and purposefully solitary, Kit carefully conceals her traumatic past, which Halpern slowly and strategically reveals in captivating flashbacks. Kit and Sunny warily size each other up as they work together, and Kit's hard shell soon begins to soften in the glow of Sunny's energy, curiosity, and pleasure in being surrounded not only by books but also by people. Hers, we learn, has been a strange and isolating life. Headquarters for the Four, a quartet of friendly, funny, bright, and observant older men, the pillars of the town, the library also becomes the base of operations for a mysterious, good-looking, seemingly prosperous man who spends all day on the computer. Halpern discloses his past, too: Rusty was a mega-rich Wall Street power player who lost it all except for his Mercedes, his stylish clothes, and his mother's old bank book, which led him to Riverton, where he's anxiously researching the town's history. In each story line, Halpern subtly tests our assumptions about self, love, marriage, family, vocation, and ethics, both personal and communal. Along the way, she offers a realistic view of the struggles and triumphs of a small public library, while framing it as a safe place in which to search for answers and solace. Halpern's unsentimental portrayal of the library as both refuge and a place of illumination and inspiration harmonizes well with that of Rebecca Makkai in The Borrower (2011), John Irving in In One Person (2012), and Howard Norman in My Darling Detective (2017). The adversity-defined perspectives and piquant senses of humor possessed by Halpern's irresistible characters shape this inclusively appealing novel's searingly candid yet ultimately benevolent worldview. Finely choreographed and lucidly told, Halpern's uplifting tale peers into suffering both random and inflicted with malice, then works its way with wisdom and charm to an unfazed celebration of supportive communities epicenters of kindness and teasing, skepticism and respect, nosiness and generosity, backed by a low-key affirmation of just how essential public libraries oases, bedrocks, incubators, launching pads are to our lives, our democracy, and our future.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
Kirkus Review
In the faded industrial town of Riverton, New Hampshire, the local library becomes a beacon for lost souls.Journalist-author Halpern (A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home, 2013, etc.) has written a sweet if mild novel with genuine charm. Prominent among the lost souls is the librarian, Kit, 44, a sardonic, highly secretive woman trying to recover from a bad marriage. Fifteen-year-old Sunny is working at the library over the summercourt-ordered penance for stealing a dictionaryand trying to figure out her oddball parents, latter-day hippies with a secret of their own. Then there's Rusty, 39, a one-time Wall Street high roller, down on his luck but with an improbable scheme to collect money from an old Riverton bank account that belonged to his mother. Joining in are The Four, lovable old-timers who "treated the [library] like a clubhouse." The book meanders amiably, filling in the back stories of the central characters, until about the last third, when the narrative kicks into high gear with a death and a fire that lead to various resolutions. If the book were a TV show, you'd call it a dramedy. It's about recovering from loss and building a family with people to whom you're not necessarily related. There are a number of affecting moments, but there are also missteps: the big reveali.e., what happened with Kit's husbandis complicated and verges on over-the-top. The last part suffers from too many teachable moments, mostly involving Kit's overly wise shrink, Dr. Bondi. And the switching back and forth between narrators is distracting.Still, the novel is suffused with a love of books and readingeach section starts with a line of poetry from a noted poetand in the end, the library's endearing denizens prove to be very good company. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary

"Sometimes the best stories in the library aren't found on its shelves; they're walking through its doors and congregating by the reference desk. Sue Halpern knows this and mines the setting for comic and tragicomic gold."--Marilyn Johnson, author of This Book Is Overdue! and The Deadbeat

From journalist and author Sue Halpern comes a wry, observant look at contemporary life and its refugees. Halpern's novel is an unforgettable tale of family. . . the kind you come from and the kind you create.

People are drawn to libraries for all kinds of reasons. Most come for the books themselves, of course; some come to borrow companionship. For head librarian Kit, the public library in Riverton, New Hampshire, offers what she craves most: peace. Here, no one expects Kit to talk about the calamitous events that catapulted her out of what she thought was a settled, suburban life. She can simply submerge herself in her beloved books and try to forget her problems.

But that changes when fifteen-year-old, home-schooled Sunny gets arrested for shoplifting a dictionary. The judge throws the book at Sunny--literally--assigning her to do community service at the library for the summer. Bright, curious, and eager to connect with someone other than her off-the-grid hippie parents, Sunny coaxes Kit out of her self-imposed isolation. They're joined by Rusty, a Wall Street high-flyer suddenly crashed to earth.

In this little library that has become the heart of this small town, Kit, Sunny, and Rusty are drawn to each other, and to a cast of other offbeat regulars. As they come to terms with how their lives have unraveled, they also discover how they might knit them together again and finally reclaim their stories.

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