One of my book clubs elected to read this book. I think I had heard of it, but I didn’t really know anything about it before picking it up.
It’s pretty cute. I wouldn’t list it among the best books I’ve read this year, but it was pretty enjoyable. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator did a fantastic job.
The book is about a man named Linus Baker who works for a division of the government in charge of monitoring magical creatures. He visits orphanages to determine whether the magical children there are safe. Then he submits a report with his recommendation as to whether the orphanage should be allowed to continue as is or close down.
When the book starts, he is summoned to a meeting with “Extremely Upper Management” to discuss his new assignment, which is so secret they have to raise his clearance level to give him the information he needs for the assignment. Even so, he finds the information he was given to be woefully inadequate.
The assignment is for him to stay for a month in an orphanage on an island. Linus has no friends or family, so there’s no one to take care of his cat while he’s away, so he takes his cat with him.
Despite the long journey to the island, Linus doesn’t open the files until he gets to the island, at which point he discovers one of the children at the orphanage is allegedly the son of the devil. Linus faints dead away at this revelation, which doesn’t win him any points with the sprite who comes to pick him up at the ferry and drive him to the orphanage.
The son of the devil (who goes by Lucy) turns out to be a really cute kid who loves using his heritage to mess with people and wastes no opportunity to raise Linus’s blood pressure.
But Linus ends up bonding with Lucy over a shared love of music, and soon enough, he learns to see past Lucy’s eccentricities. And the better Lucy gets to know Linus, the more he drops the act.
There’s also a woodland sprite, a gnome named Thalia who has a beard, despite being a girl. There’s a shapeshifting dogperson named Sal who’s very shy, but loves to write. There’s Chauncey, who is some sort of creature — no one is sure what he is, but he has dreams of becoming a bellhop and insists on doing Linus’s laundry.
Then there’s the head of the orphanage, Arthur Parnassus, whom Linus finds dreamy, and is clearly also attracted to Linus.
There’s also a lot about xenophobia in this book. Arthur keeps the children on the island and away from the rest of the world for fear of how they’ll be treated. But Linus points out that they’ll have to go out into the world eventually, they might as well start preparing for that reality sooner rather than later. And keeping the children away from the townspeople just makes the townspeople more fearful of the children because they don’t get a chance to interact with them and see that they’re just like other children.
I wouldn’t say I learned anything new from this book, but I would absolutely give it to a kid I wanted to learn more about accepting others for who they are.