Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, 288 pagesOK, here's what it says in our OPAC: "After a layoff during the Great Recession sidelines his tech career, Clay Jannon takes a job at the titular bookstore in San Francisco, and soon realizes that the establishment is a facade for a strange secret." If you're going to describe it in one sentence, that certainly does it. HOWEVER, that description doesn't explain the appeal of this engaging page-turner. In this book, Sloan has written a love letter to the awesome power of books and the Internet, and he's done it by creating a novel that has a little bit of adventure, nerdiness, fantasy, realism, and downright awesomeness for everyone. The characters are great, the locations are well-realized, and the plot kept me guessing until the last page. I don't know the last time a book did that. Fantastic.
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