
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a romp of a first novel by Robin Sloan. It’s a perfect book for booklovers who lean toward the mysterious and fantastic, blurring genre lines throughout to afford readers a marvelous time.
The novel begins when Clay Jannon, the first-person narrator, is responding to an advertisement for a clerk in a 24-hour bookstore in San Francisco. Clay was educated as a graphic artist, but he’s finding jobs scarce since his work designing a logo and a website for a bagel bakery and acting as the “voice” of @NewBagel on Twitter — definitely a new economy sort of job. When the bakery went bust along with the rest of the economy less than a year after Clay took the job, he was left jobless with a very slim resume. So the help wanted ad in the window of the bookstore seems like a godsend, even though Clay questions whether the bookstore is a... Read More