LIBRARY GIRL

Four librarians secretly raise the baby they found one day in the children’s room of the Huffington, Indiana, town library.

The women are friends, all single and childless (though not by choice), and each is a little quirky. By the time Essie’s 11, she’s read a great deal about the world but experienced little. Meeting G.E., a boy who looks just like her, makes her dream of being part of a large family. The two plot: Essie’s four mothers could marry the four male department store employees who are G.E.’s dads. The real outcome turns out to be slightly more complicated. The adult characters are drawn with broad, slightly stereotypical strokes: fat, white Midwesterner Doris is a terrible cook, French Jeanne-Marie is “thin and spiky” but a romantic at heart, Black Taisha has incredible skin and “a lovely froth of black hair around her head like moss,” and black-haired Lucinda has “that kind of look” that makes people think of fortunetellers (likewise, Hernandez, one of G.E.’s dads, “makes great Mexican food,” in contrast to the “regular stuff” prepared by one of his white dads). Horvath doesn’t simplify her vocabulary or philosophical musings for her audience, tossing in, without translation, French phrases and a little Yiddish. The low-tech, late-20th-century, small-town setting offers a safe, well-staffed library: It’s a lovely daydream for readers who think that E.L. Konigsburg’s Claudia Kincaid had the right idea (but should have run away to a library instead of the Met).

Amusing.