The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

I finished this book at about 11:30 last night, and I still don't know what to say about it. The best adjective I can come up with is "weird". It's just so weird! That's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm just still trying to figure out what this thing is about.

Let me start with plot. Steve is a regular guy. He meets Carolyn in a bar. She's a little strange (biker shorts with leg warmers strange), but she's fascinating and seems nice. Turns out she's not so nice. She's a Librarian. But not the way we think of librarians. It's a fantasy novel, so of course not the way we understand librarian.

So basically, Carolyn and all the kids in her neighborhood were orphaned at the same time. They were taken under the wing of the weird guy across the street. He assigns them all sections of his "library" to study and is fairly abusive to them if they step out of line. His enemies are interested in taking over his universe. When the weird guy goes missing after 25 years, Carolyn uses Steve to try to figure out what's going on.

The main characters are interesting and funny. Beside Carolyn and Steve, Erwin is an ex-military guy who has had a book and movie done about his heroics during wartime. He is the government operative assigned to this weird case after Carolyn gets Steve accused of killing a police detective. He's kind of awesome really. I liked him. The lions are also pretty good characters. Yes, lions.

My biggest problem with the book was the number of dog casualties involved. When my husband recommended it he forgot about the dogs. I can't let it go. Even though these were very bad doggies, that was a very hard scene for me to get through.

I am giving this 7 out of 10 bookmarks.