We already know from the prologue that Lucy needs to cover her tracks because of what happened in "Hannibal." And we soon know that Lucy's wisecracking sublimates a simmering discontent ready to boil over into rage. Instead, four years later, Lucy is the head children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri - well, actually, she admits, she's borrowed the name from the real Hannibal, "out there minding its own business." Lucy Hull, didn't plan on becoming a librarian when she graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2002, but she didn't want to go back to Chicago or be beholden to her father, a Russian immigrant who would have happily paid for "the most self-indulgent, nonfunded MFA" or finagled her a cushy job with one of his shady business connections. Makkai avoids almost all the pitfalls of debut fiction, including sentimentality and undigested autobiography, and though her plotting isn't as deft as her characterizations, the wonderfully nuanced closing pages more than make up for the occasional longueurs that precede them. White to "Where's Spot?" By Eric Hill, while crafting her own distinctive sound in a first novel definitely not for kids. In her bracingly tough-minded tale of a discontented librarian who hits the road with a maladjusted 10-year-old, Rebecca Makkai tips her hat to a shelf-load of children's literature, offering sly echoes of everything from "Charlotte's Web" by E.B.
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