2021/054: The Library of Lost Things -- Laura Taylor Namey

I never grasped for ways to be like this woman, but I was all she had. [loc. 234]

Darcy Wells has grown up loving books and reading: they are her comfort and her shield against a mother who's rejected her own literature-student past and now prefers to shop online, filling their apartment with useless tat. Darcy has managed to conceal her mother's hoarding from all but a very few, chief among them her best friend Marisol: but now there is a new manager at the apartment complex, one who wants to inspect the apartment. Darcy is terrified that they'll be evicted. And worse: her grandmother, who has (unbeknownst to Darcy's mother) been supporting them financially, threatens to cease payments when Darcy turns eighteen. Darcy's paycheck from the local bookshop won't cover the bills. And between work, and financial panic, and looking after her mother, she doesn't have the time or the inclination to date. Not even when local heartthrob Asher Fleet, whose promising future as a pilot has been wrecked by a car crash, keeps turning up at the bookshop to flirt with her ...

I loved Darcy and Marisol's friendship -- mutually supportive, fond and funny -- and Darcy's ability to recite, word-perfect, from books she's read years before. And I was really charmed by her discovery of a heavily-annotated copy of Peter Pan that some other young woman seems to have used as journal and diary: Darcy realises that "the poems and scribblings in my new-old Peter Pan had gotten me through more emotional tight spots than [mom's] words ever had". There are other echoes of Peter Pan too: an acorn kiss, and of course a boy who can fly ...

Darcy is a competent young woman negotiating a difficult life and multiple layers of secrets: her own, her mother's, her absent father's, her grandmother's. Only when she finally understands the pain at the root of her mother's hoarding -- and accepts that she too is a kind of hoarder -- can the healing begin.

This was uncomfortably resonant in places: my mother was also something of a hoarder, though in her case I think it was at least partly to do with growing up during wartime. This novel made me wonder if there was more to it: if there was something she had lost, or left behind, or had taken from her ... There were secrets I was only told after my mother's death that might have helped me make sense of things: and maybe there were secrets that nobody living now knows.

Fulfils the 'A Young Adult Novel by a Latinx Author' rubric of the Reading Women 2021 Challenge. The author is Cuban-American, and Marisol is Latinx though Darcy isn't.