Review: Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository [and Yarn]

Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository [and Yarn] by Rebecca McKee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked this up (pre-publication, via Netgalley) largely because the title reminded me of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore , for which I have a fondness despite its imperfections. It doesn't have many other similarities to Penumbra apart from the title (and, obviously, a wondrous bookstore); this bookstore is somehow holding the universe together, is located in a small coastal town in New England rather than in Northern California, and is only visible to people who need something from it.

We start out being told that something is awry in the state of the universe that the bookstore holds together, and then we get a long sequence of different points of view from the people who work there, a customer, and the roommate of one of the workers, all of whom are sensing some sort of wrongness they can't put their finger on and are usually doing their best to ignore, and most of whom have (it is hinted, and gradually revealed) secrets they are ashamed of. It has the feel of something that could turn much more horror than cozy. Spoiler in case you need to know which in order to decide whether to read it: (view spoiler)[it's OK in the end. It's not horror. But the journey does get harrowing. (hide spoiler)]

This long middle section takes up most of the book, and for me moved too slowly. Just past half-way, I got bored enough with it, and uncomfortable enough with the constant hints of something wrong that wasn't yet being revealed, that I went off and read another book. But I did come back and finish it, and I'm glad I did, because the ending is compelling and pulls together the carefully-set-up backstories of the characters, all of whom needed to learn something and some of whom also needed to teach something to one or more of the others. My five-star rating is because it has a degree of psychological depth and (like one of the characters in the story) adeptly weaves together a number of threads. It's not, as I've mentioned, without its flaws - the tell-don't-show prologue, the slow-moving middle, and also a character, Violet, who I didn't feel was sufficiently developed for the weight she bears in the plot to hit as hard as it could have. But even if Goodreads would let me drop my pre-publication five-star rating to four - which it won't - I might leave it at five anyway, though it's only just in that zone. Call it a strong four-and-a-half.

The copy editing is good; I could quibble about the instances of "may" that should be "might" and the occasional missing past perfect where I personally would include one, but hardly anyone writing these days doesn't make those mistakes, and most people don't seem to notice.

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