The Lost Library by Wendy Mass and Rebecca Stead

Title: The Lost Library

Author: Wendy Mass and Rebecca Stead

Genre: Mystery

Publisher: Text Australia

Published: 3^rd October 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 224

Price: $16.99

Synopsis: The New York Times bestselling authors of Bob, Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass, introduce readers to a little free library guarded by a cat and a boy who takes on the mystery it keeps.

When a mysterious little free library (guarded by a large orange cat) appears overnight in the small town of Martinville, eleven-year-old Evan plucks two weathered books from its shelves, never suspecting that his life is about to change.

Evan and his best friend Rafe quickly discover a link between one of the old books and a long-ago event that none of the grown-ups want to talk about. The two boys start asking questions whose answers will transform not only their own futures, but the town itself.

Told in turn by a ghost librarian named Al, an ageing (but beautiful) cat named Mortimer, and Evan himself, The Lost Library is a timeless story from award-winning authors Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass. It’s about owning your truth, choosing the life you want, and the power of a good book (and, of course, the librarian who gave it to you).

~*~

The free little library of Martinville is guarded by a cat called Mortimer and the ghosts of the old library staff – Al, Ms Scoggin and Mr Brock, who died in the 1999 fire. But nobody knows who, or what caused the fire and in the years since, the library and its fate have been forgotten. Until library carts with books start appearing, and Martinville gets its own free little library. When Evan starts to find books from the day before the fire with his father’s name in them as a borrower, he decides to look into the mystery further.

He enlists his friend Rafe to help – but none of the adults in the town want to talk about what happened to the library. So, it’s up to Evan to find out what happened, with a little help from H.G. Higgins, who wrote a book about how to write a mystery. And from the start, we have three voices – Evan, the eleven-year-old boy wanting to solve the mystery, Mortimer, a cat who was there at the time of the fire, and is now guarding the free little library. And Al, a ghost librarian said to have died in the fire. These three characters are the centre of the novel, and each has their own perspective on what happened to the library.

Each perspective is set out neatly in short, punchy chapters that unveil a mystery through a gentle narrative. At times it feels like a bit of a crime story, and there are hints at a police investigation. However, I think it is a good mystery for kids. It’s not violent, and it examines how a community responds to a tragedy, like losing the library and the staff. The silence of the adults speaks volumes – as though it was a traumatic experience for the town, and at first, I wondered if there was going to be a sinister crime hidden within. There were a few secrets that ebbed and flowed throughout the novel, highlighting the reluctance of people to find out what happened. This created a sense of tension within the novel that helped move the story along, and made the pacing work nicely throughout the novel.

What I liked about this novel was its distinctly unique ability to create a world and setting that could be transplanted anywhere. The small town was carefully created to give this specific, yet not overly specific feeling. It ensured that readers could see themselves and their world in the novel, because its primary focus was celebrating books, libraries, reading and cats amidst solving a decades old mystery. This is what drew me into the book, and I think the way it worked through the mystery was done well. It’s gentle tone and pace was reassuring, and even when the pace picked up later in the novel, there was always a sense that there was no real danger. For younger readers, this can help them ease into reading mystery stories if they prefer gentler stories like this. It’s quite different from some of the mysteries I read a child by Emily Rodda and Enid Blyton. But it still sits within this genre well as an example of how each mystery and crime book can be approached in a different way.

The Lost Library is a book with an interesting mystery that will appeal to readers aged eight and over.