Tolog Review: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
by Robin Sloan
reviewed by Tiffany Xia

In Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a mystery novel set in modern day San Francisco, the protagonist Clay Jannon loses his job as a web designer and finds himself working the night shift at a very mysterious book store. Clay does not know anything about the bookstore and does not dare ask too many questions when he starts working there since he needs a job very badly. He soon notices many strange things like how the owner “doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the bestseller lists…So, no teenage wizards or vampire police here. That’s a shame, because this is exactly the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard. This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard” (Page 12). When he meets the store owner, Penumbra, he is very curious, but Penumbra does not answer any of Clay’s questions about the store. Instead, Penumbra simply tells him that all Clay needs to do is check out books for customers and never open the books on the shelves.

After working at the bookstore for a month, Clay still has no clue about how the book store works. Clay only gets one or two customers per week or sometimes two weeks. He finds out that people have to become a member of a club to be able to check out a book at the store. As Clay’s desire to discover the secrets of the book store grows, he and his friend, Neel, flip open a book to find that all the books in the bookstore are coded. Clay is very confused and decides to dig even deeper, so he and his girlfriend Kat, a analyst at Google, decides to decode one of the books in the store uncovering the huge secrets about the bookstore and what is behind it. 

I really liked this book and overall it is one of the most interesting books I have ever read. I could not put this book down after I started reading it and I am usually not a person who likes reading books. Throughout the book, Robin Sloan uses 1st person making it easier for the readers to understand Clay’s point of view and how he feels. It makes readers want to solve the mystery with Clay and put pieces of the puzzle together as he does. I knew exactly how Clay feels and share his excitement when “Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf” (Sloan 143). Sloan also makes the novel exciting and relatable for modern readers by explaining and having the characters use cool technologies like book scanners and code breaking algorithms. The discussions about cryptography, how to build websites, and Kat’s work at Google really interested me. There is a connection to the real world which makes readers feel the story is realistic and believable. Overall I would recommend this book to people who like mystery books and enjoy learning about current technologies.