The Library Thief, by Kuchenga Shenjé

Look at that cover. Read the blurb. A bookbinder heroine with a scandalous past, hired to conserve a rare book collection? Of course I would request an ARC!

Beware: generally, the language of the period; racism and racist slurs; phonetic accents to denote class; parental neglect and emotional abuse; off-the-charts misogyny; marital rape; rape on page; queerphobia; sex on page.

The Library Thief, by Kuchenga Shenjé

I must preface this review with a note that I found the writing voice simultaneously compelling and difficult; I am sure I missed many literary and cultural references, which at times made reading on a bit of a struggle. In the manner of Victorian classics, the narrative follows the present and the past simultaneously; it’s not so much including flashbacks as constantly interweaving childhood memories with current events, and not a writing style I am used to or particularly enjoy.

The story is narrated in first person, past tense, by the protagonist, a white-passing nineteen-year-old Black Jamaican woman, in late Victorian England, fleeing some misfortune and landing herself into a worse bind.

The publisher’s book sets up the novel thusly:

The library is under lock and key. But its secrets can’t be contained.

1896. After he brought her home from Jamaica as a baby, Florence’s father had her hair hot-combed to make her look like the other girls. But as a young woman, Florence is not so easy to tame—and when she brings scandal to his door, the bookbinder throws her onto the streets of Manchester.

Intercepting her father’s latest commission, Florence talks her way into the remote, forbidding Rose Hall to restore its collection of rare books. Lord Francis Belfield’s library is old and full of secrets—but none so intriguing as the whispers about his late wife.

Then one night, the library is broken into. Strangely, all the priceless tomes remain untouched. Florence is puzzled, until she discovers a half-burned book in the fireplace. She realizes with horror that someone has found and set fire to the secret diary of Lord Belfield’s wife–which may hold the clue to her fate…

Evocative, arresting and tightly plotted, The Library Thief is at once a propulsive Gothic mystery and a striking exploration of race, gender and self-discovery in Victorian England.

Like every good Gothic tale, the novel begins with the arrival of one Miss Florence Granger to the isolated Rose Hall estate; she’s there under false pretenses, in a last ditch effort at quasi-respectable survival. While she wasn’t quite sure what to expect, having never before visited a wealthy patron’s residence, she’s nevertheless shocked at finding the mansion virtually shut down, with black hangings over all the windows, and with the staff reduced to one groom and the cook to serve the lord of the manor.

“A sensible girl would just have laid there, given thanks and gone to sleep to get as much rest as possible before starting work the very next morning. The problem is, I’ve never been known to be sensible. … If the circumstances of Lady Persephone’s passing were honourable then the details surrounding her death would be more forthcoming. I smelled the whiff of scandal, and I just had to know what it was.” (Chapter 3)

And thus begin Florence’s adventures. She’s at the manor to repair, rebind, and otherwise conserve, a large number of valuable rare books within a short period of time, as Lord Belfield, once very wealthy indeed, is now in somewhat dire straits and must sell off some of the most valuable tomes in his collection. The library, a wondrous place full of knowledge and wonder, is always locked–and so is she, inside it, during the hours she works there.

“Lord Belfield spoke as if I had hiked myself up to a mountain of independence. But I was not safe. I had little security outside of the temporary benevolence he was seeing fit to bestow upon me.” (Chapter 9)

There is a vague sense of foreboding as Florence recounts her experiences during the first weeks of her employment at the manor, mostly stemming from the strangeness of the household, and the multitude of unanswered questions about the recent death of Lord Belfield’s wife. However, lest the reader gets used to that relatively mild feeling of discomfort, Florence adds the occasional reminder of “how much worse” she would experience later on–starting with the introduction of Sir Chester, her employer’s cruel and abusive younger brother, and continuing with the realization of how much she had originally underestimated Lord Belfield’s ruthlessness.

“I got chills around him because of how he could slip from charming benevolent to all-seeing punisher in the space of one conversation. He enjoyed the power of his position as Lord of Rose Hall.” (Chapter 16)

The worldbuilding is very careful, from the physical spaces to each character’s manner of speech, to the imperial influences that reach from the spices in the kitchen to Lord Belfield’s financial reversals. Because, as it turns out, the family wealth had been built on sugar plantations, tea, and the slave trade, and like so much of British aristocracy after abolition, the brothers had yet to figure out how to replenish their coffers.

However, there’s such a thing as too much historic detail when its inclusion doesn’t move the story forward, such as when Florence spends an afternoon at a suffragists’ lecture.

And even though Florence muses about everything, from love to sexuality to politics to religion, for page upon page upon page, to the point where the book drags on, there’s little character growth over the course of the story.

Despite the precariousness of her situation, there’s an innate arrogance in Florence, stemming from both her intellect and her education; she is better read than most everyone around her, and had assumed that made her worldly, if not wise. It takes Florence some time to realize just how complex the relationships between the people around her truly are, though once she does, she accepts them without judgement.

Having been raised by her white father and grandmother in Manchester, Florence was constantly exposed to the racism of the white people around her; from those who wonder whether Black people have tails to those who believe in their ‘innate’ and ‘excessive’ sexuality–which naturally makes them a danger to everyone around them. She is therefore surprised to learn that the late Lady Persephone’s lady’s maid was a Black woman who enjoyed a not-small degree of privilege within the household during all the years of the marriage–and even more to learn of her own ancestry.

I can see what the author was going for with the character and the story, and I appreciate the breadth of queer representation in it; the execution as a whole just didn’t quite work for me.

This novel is very much historical fiction, and as such, it lacks the feeling of “righting of the universe” that I get from genre fiction; even the solution to the mystery of Lady Persephone’s death felt flat. Florence suffers much, first at the hands of her father, then at the hands of Sir Chester, but so do practically all the other women in the story. Surviving long enough to get away to face an uncertain future in a provably cruel world, with nothing but a bit of money, just doesn’t feel like justice.

Also, I was quite confused by the honorifics. The late wife of Lord Francis Belfield is referred to by everyone, including him, as Lady Persephone, never Lady Belfield. Why? Meanwhile, his younger brother is Sir Chester? And his wife is referred to as Lady Violet? Again I ask, why?

(It did not help my reading experience that the ARC had some weird formatting issues, from arbitrary line breaks in the middle of a sentence, to equally random spaces inserted in the middle of words, or the occasional letter floating above the rest of the text; the non-existent table of contents was just insult added to injury.)

The Library Thief gets a 7.00 out of 10