Pearl herself is biracial her “long-gone father” was black and her mother is white. Both the neighborhood and the library staff are robustly diverse. An array of endearing supporting characters, coupled with a plot both grounded in stressful reality and uplifted by urban fantasy, lend the story its charm. Pearl is an odd but genuine narrator, possessed of a complex and emotional inner voice warring with a stridently stubborn outer one. Literary references are peppered throughout (clarified with somewhat superfluous footnotes) in addition to a variety of tangential sidebars (the identity of whose writer becomes delightfully clear later on). Indeed, that love-of libraries, of books, and most of all of stories-suffuses the entire narrative. With the help of friends old, uncertainly developing, and new, Pearl must spin story after compelling story in hopes of saving what she loves most. Thus ensues an enchanting plunge into the underbelly of a failing library and a city brimful of secrets. Vincent Millay is found to be missing, Pearl’s scream brings the entire neighborhood running. When the head of the library’s beloved statue of poet Edna St.

Pearl Moran was born in the Lancaster Avenue branch library and considers it more her home than the apartment she shares with her mother, the circulation librarian.

This is the way Pearl’s world ends: not with a bang but with a scream. By the end, she has rescued the spoiled young aristocrat, eluded her brothers, gotten a lead on her mother thanks to a series of cleverly coded messages and even set herself up as a “Perditorian”-a finder of lost things and people.Ī tasty appetizer, with every sign of further courses to come. Naïve but a quick study, and more resourceful than even her renowned siblings, Enola resolutely surmounts each challenge that comes her way.

On the way, she falls into the furor surrounding an apparent kidnapping (see title)-and then, barely does she arrive in the big city before some authentically scary ruffians snatch her, too. Rather than meekly knuckle under, though, Enola makes careful preparation (she thinks) and slips off to track her wayward parent down. Having led a free-spirited but cloistered life on the ancestral country estate, 14-year-old Enola Holmes is thrown for a loop by her mother’s sudden disappearance-not to mention the subsequent arrival of her long-absent big brothers, both of whom turn out to be overbearing and dismissive of women. With gleeful panache, Springer introduces an innocent but capable young sleuth-the younger sister of Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes, no less-and takes her from wild English countryside to the soupy filth of Victorian London.

The missing marquess