Summer Hours at the Robbers Library
by Sue Halpern
5 stars
Sunny is a fifteen-year-old girl who was caught stealing a dictionary at a bookstore. She is sentenced to 12-weeks community service at the Riverton Public Library. You would think a teen-ager would be upset by this, but Sunny is actually quite excited. She’ll get to spend time with people other than her hippie parents who don’t believe in formal education, and she’ll be around the books and knowledge she craves.
Kit is a librarian at the Riverton Public Library. She likes working there because it’s peaceful—until Sunny comes along. Kit is put in charge of Sunny and they begin a cautious relationship that grows and then encompasses some of the other patrons of the library. But everyone has secrets. Will Sunny discover these secrets before the end of summer?
I really loved this book. Yes, I’m a librarian and I like anything that has to do with libraries and reading, but this book was so much more than that. We can tell from the start that Kit was trapped in an unhappy marriage, and she’s no longer in the marriage. The author expertly drops little tidbits all through the book that explains what happened in her marriage that makes the reader want to continue reading. I was rooting for both Kit and Sunny right from the start because they’re both smart, strong women. I think it’s the sign of a well-written book that, days later, I am still thinking about these characters.
Read-alikes:
The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan
The Library at the Edge of the World by Felicity Hayes-McCoy
By the Book by Julia Sonneborn
