Summer Hours at the Robbers LIbrary

by Sue Halpern

The story is about a woman who so wants to leave her past life that she changes her name.  She takes a job as a Reference Librarian in Riverton, NJ because she thinks no one will know her there.  She buys an old house and pays to get it fixed up but she does little to furnish it.

A teenage girl is sent to court because she tried to steal a dictionary from a bookstore.  As her punishment she is sentenced to do volunteer work at the library for the entire summer.  The Reference Librarian is not happy to have the delinquent assigned to her.  The punishment isn't all that bad for the young girl as she loves book and she is so useful she soon starts to run the kids program at the library.  The Librarian is reluctant to share information about herself despite the prying of the young girl.  She finds out that the young girl has been home schooled and her parents are living a somewhat hippie lifestyle.

The library has many strange characters who visit, there is a group of four old men who hang out in the library every morning.  The Librarian becomes quite fond of them.  There is a well dressed young man who comes in and uses the computer every day.  They eventually find out he was a stock broker or investment banker in New York and lost his job and all his wordly possessions except his wardrobe and his car in the market crash.  He is trying to track down an old bank account of his mother as this will give him some cash.

The old guys eventually welcome the young man into their gang, the Librarian becomes friendly to the young thief even having her stay over at her place.  She feels really sorry for the girl when the young girl suspects the man she thinks is her fathe is a fugitive from the law-- having attacked a lab.

The librarian and the young man become friends.  We eventually learn that the Librarian sacrificed her life for her husband who became a doctor.  They did not have a happy marriage and eventually the husband has an affair with an unattractive teenage nanny who later turns up dead.  At her husband's trial the woman's seems to be on trial as the cause for her husband's behaviour.  That is why she wants to get away and start a new life.

It was an entertaining story, the librarian's  life story at the end was an interesting bit of added drama in the story.