Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library by Chris Grabenstein
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for book- and puzzle-nerds. or, as one character says, “It’ll be like The Hunger Games but with lots of food and no bows or arrows.”
it takes place in alexandriaville, ohio (not a real place, but a real cutesy reference, one of many peppering this book), whose town library was demolished 12 years ago. a wealthy eccentric gentleman who made his fortune creating a series of very popular games and puzzles decides to rebuild the library and engineers an elaborate publicity stunt where twelve children from the town, all twelve years of age, who have never had the pleasure of browsing through the stacks of a public library, are selected to participate in a lock-in and encouraged to solve a series of puzzles to “escape” the library and win a fabulous prize. these are three of my favorite things: puzzles, books, and lock-ins.
i can’t imagine growing up in a town without a library. i am from the smallest state of them all, from a wee village, but there was a town library reasonably close that i could walk to in the summer when i was a teenager. when i was too young to walk there, i used to be driven – dropped off, actually, while my parents ran errands or tried to obtain the paperwork necessary for trading me in for a horse (an oft-used threat in my house). but i grew up in those stacks, making my way from the picture books to the chapter books to the adult books, there not being much in the way of teen fiction when i was that age. so it was heartwarming indeed for me to follow these characters as they experience the thrills of the library for the first time, even though this library is way cooler than any library that actually exists, with holograms of tigers and all.
and grabenstein is smart – this is librarian-bait like crazy. librarians love books about librarians, and books that teach kids how cool the library is, and kids love fast-paced books filled with puzzles to solve. it’s pretty much win-win.
is is a perfect book? nah – the characters are pretty stock, the outcome predictable, and the puzzles are not as cool as those in my beloved peggy parish series.
but it does teach kids how to use the library: how the dewey decimal system works, what the archives are, how to ask a librarian for help, and there is also a lot of trivia about literature and A LOT of book-title name-dropping, which would have thrilled me as a little girl and would have made me take out a little pencil and mini-notebook to write down each and every title so i could read those books as well. nerd alert!
speaking of nerd alert – in this book, i am totally sierra. more excited to be in a building full of books than playing/winning a contest?? curled up reading while everyone else is running around playing games?? yeah, that sounds familiar. i spent a lot of my summer camp days curled up reading under the piano while everyone else just went nuts making stuff with pipe cleaners and singing along with the radio.
but while it does have its flaws, it is still super-super fun, and any book that makes the library sound like THE place to be is okay by me. plus there are many examples of how not to be a jerk, which can get a little cloying and unrealistic at times, but are probably useful because the world already has enough jerks. plus: BOOKS!! PUZZLES!! LOCK-INS!!
fun times one million.
oh, and this is the author’s note:
Is the game really over?
Maybe not.
There is one more puzzle in the book that wasn’t in the story. (Although a clue about how to find it was!)
If you figure out the solution, let me know.
and then he gives his email address.
and so now i have to read it again, because i wanna solve this hidden puzzle!
very smart, indeed, grabenstein…very. smart. indeed.
