The Lost Library

The Lost Library by Rebecca Stead is a quiet small town mystery for 9 year olds, told in turns by a boy, an orange cat and a librarian.

What happens

One morning a little wooden box on a pole turns up on the green in Martinville. Nobody saw it arrive. There's a handwritten sign inside. Take a book, leave a book. Or both.

Evan is early for school, so he has a look. The glass doors swing open and out comes a smell of apple sauce. And possibly cheese.

He takes the two smallest books, on the grounds that two small ones are really only one.

Underneath the box there's a huge orange cat. Evan knows this cat. It sits in an upstairs window of the town's History House every morning and it has never once been outside.

The cat is called Mortimer, he has six toes on every paw, and his chapters are the best bit. He has a great many feelings and hardly any words. He spends his evenings politely herding mice out of the basement before anyone spots them.

Mortimer knows exactly where that box of books came from. He watched it being built out of an old library cart in the dark, and he minded very much, because what's on those shelves is all that's left of the library he grew up in.

Nobody in town will talk about what happened to that library. That's the mystery, and your reader will be a fair way into it before the grown-ups give anything away.

There's a ghost in this too, and she's one of the three voices. She's chatty and fond of baking rather than frightening, so it isn't a scary book at all.

What makes it lovely is the pace. Short chapters, switching between the three of them, and the story fills in gradually. There's a lot of ordinary life in it as well. Evan's dad is paid to get rid of people's mice and secretly drives them over the mountain to a nice bit of woodland instead, which is why so many customers turn up wanting a refund.

If your reader likes a mystery that's about a town and an old secret rather than any actual danger, this suits them down to the ground. It also rewards a child who enjoys spotting how the three stories fit together.

What to read next

Rebecca Stead wrote this one with Wendy Mass, and the two of them also wrote Bob. That's another very quiet book with a strange small companion in it, this time waiting in a cupboard in Australia for a girl who has forgotten all about him.