My favourite fictional work about librarians is A Month of Living Vicariously, by Tony Price. It’s the novella I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2011, and it has so much of myself in it, that there’s no way I couldn’t love it like a child of my own. I truly think it’s the best thing I’ve written for NaNo, and every time I read it in the months after November 2011, it cheered me up and made me laugh. (Available in PDF format on request!)
But Salley Vickers’s latest novel is much better, of course. And it made me cry, which is always a good sign, and made me feel good at the same time.
It’s the story of Sylvia Blackwell, an idealistic recently-qualified librarian who takes up an appointment as children’s librarian in East Mole, in the year 1958. We follow her trials and tribulations as she works to share her passion for books, and for encouraging children to read and love them, in the hostile environment created by her boss, her neighbour (who happens to be chairman of the Libraries Committee), the local middle-class ladies, and an education system that fails 75% of children, before they even start secondary school, by making them jump through the 11+ hoop. (I challenge anyone who reads this not to share the author’s conviction that the 11+ is iniquitous and barbaric: how can we still countenance it in so many parts of this country?)
Sylvia succeeds spectacularly, and she fails. She falls in love and has a hopeless affair with a married man. She moves away from East Mole. She has changed lives for ever.
I won’t give away anything about Part 2, the last 40 pages; but I hope you will read them and weep, too. The final Author’s Note by itself is worth the price of the book (which is in any case a modest £8.99).
You should read this book,
- if you love books, libraries, or librarians
- if you are grateful to librarians or have ever been one
- if you share the author’s rage at the closing of public libraries, and the damage being done to future generations by the policies that have led to those closures
- if you remember the 1950s, or want to know what they were like
- if you just want a great read
Thank you, Salley Vickers!
Godspelled 