Chapter Fifty-Eight: The Borrower

This is a strange, original story by Rebecca Makkai about a young children's librarian who inadvertently finds herself kidnapping a child patron and embarking on a road trip from Missouri to Vermont.  The extreme realism of this story makes it almost believable and also a little depressing, although the narrator's Russian mobster father adds some (dark) humor to the tale that helps lighten it up a bit.  It's less a story about a kidnapping than a story about the narrator's search for home, although you can see how the two ideas are related.  It's not really a happy story, but it is well-told and well-written and a little quirky, and it's an interesting read, for sure.