The library of lost anf found by Phaedra Patrick

Martha Storm is a librarian. If someone asked her about her job she had an explanation ready. She said she was a « guardian of books »...but also an event organizer, tour guide, buyer, filer, job adviser, talking clock, housekeeper, walking encyclopedia, stationery provider, recommender of somewhere nice to eat lunch and a shoulder to cry on – all rolled into one.

One day, at the library, Martha finds a brown paper parcel with a small ink stamp on the back. She wondered what was inside. As expected she found a book but the cover and title page were both missing. On top was a business card and a handwritten note from Owen Chamberlain, one of the bookseller in Sandshift. He would say that he could not sell the book due to its condition, but thought that it might interest Martha because of the message inside. This is when she found a dedication from her beloved grandmother Zelda who dies in mysterious circumstances years earlier. But the date she's written is three years after she died. The stories in the book are also...well, personal. So Martha determines to uncover the truth.

This book will tell you the story of a girl who from an early age has always loved to lose herself in reading and writing stories. She listened to fairy tales with a furrowed brow. Later on, when she became an adult, working at the library made her feel more alive so we can definitely say that books and libraries are vitally important to Martha, throughout her childhood and also in the present day. To me, they also mean a lot and this book did echo with some personal experience. « When Zelda died. Martha wedged herself in the corner of the fiction section, knees tucked up to her chin, reading books after school or at the weekends. And as the pages grew bumpy with her tears, they helped her to cope with her grief. »
This book also raise the question about staying with your parents when they get oders. Martha just focused on being helpful, a dutiful daughter. But later on, it was clear to her, though that she'd given up her own chance of happiness by not following her fiance Joe to America. Does the responsability of caring for older realtives usually fall on the shoulders of one sibling more than others ?

In that book, I really enjoyed travelling back in the past and discovering Martha's fairy stories feature in the book. My favorite one was “The bird girl” because I just loved her imagination and her desire of being away, flying in a world where being the best all the time didn't matter.

As a child, I used to visit the library each week on Wednesday with my mum and my sisters. I loved to be surrounded by the books and my mum was a very good story teller. She would invent stories and would tell us about Leontine and Nicolas using puppets and making us smile. The writer tells us that books can help us to escape, they entertain and they educate. They make us travelling from one place to another.  

The book is well-written and well-conceived. I absolutely loved the flashback and being able to follow the main character from her childhood and understanding how she became that woman who has always found it easier to connect with books than people.

A charming novel !