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For book lovers, reading about magical libraries can have a special appeal—a place that, in the real world, already feels enchanted and full of possibility can literally be so in fantasy. Below are six books set in extraordinary enchanted libraries.
In addition to browsing by genre, time period, setting and a wide range of themes, BookBrowse offers specialized reading lists in our "beyond the book" section. These lists are curated by our professional reviewers to accompany featured works, and they can help you familiarize yourself with many fascinating niches of the book world.
Below are just a few examples of the hundreds of articles available in our Reading Lists category.
Unsurprisingly, stories featuring the circumstances of child or teenage protagonists during World War II tend to appear prominently in the category of young adult literature, with classics like Lois Lowry's Number the Stars existing as staples of historical fiction in schools and libraries all over. But as is the case with Jennifer Rosner's Once We Were Home, which follows grown-up characters reckoning with how they were displaced away from their Jewish families during the Holocaust, some books written for adults also center the specific viewpoints of those who experienced the war as children. Below are just a few.
The cover of the young adult fantasy novel Nightbirds by Kate J. Armstrong reliably hints at the promise and magic of the story that lies within while also seeking to differentiate itself in a saturated market. Not only is the artwork attractively rendered, but it shows the emotion and supernatural abilities of the character Matilde with symbolism attached to the particular bird associated with her in the novel: the goldfinch. This portrayal of Matilde brings the reader's attention to her beauty and lips — the main characters' kisses are the means by which they convey their magic to others. At the same time, her eyes are drawn in a way that evokes the sadness and yearning she feels as she comes of age and fights to establish her own power against years of entrenched oppression. This imagery and the cover as a whole reflect many current trends in young adult fantasy.
Between autumn 2020 and spring 2021, lots of COVID-themed books started to appear on bookstore and library shelves in the UK, where I live. It felt like nonfiction was quicker to respond to the pandemic than fiction. Some of my favorites were too niche for US publication because they focus on the UK’s National Health Service (Intensive Care by Gavin Francis, a Scottish GP) or England’s lockdown spring (The Consolation of Nature by Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Mynott, and Peter Marren). It soon became a low-key obsession of mine to read whatever I could about COVID.
I’ve especially valued insider looks by medical professionals. Every Minute Is a Day by Robert Meyer, MD and Dan Koeppel is a blow-by-blow account of the first six months of the pandemic by an ER doctor at the Bronx’s Montefiore Medical Center. The statistics are stark: Of 6,000 COVID-19 patients admitted between March and September 2020, nearly 1,000 died. The situation changed daily as doctors recognized new symptoms and tested treatments.
Kalani Pickhart's debut novel I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four central characters through the tumultuous days of Ukraine's Euromaidan protests that took place between November 2013 and February 2014. The protests are so named because they were centered on Kyiv's Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) and were triggered by then President Viktor Yanukovych's refusal to sign an agreement with the European Union that had been overwhelmingly approved by Ukraine's parliament. The protesters also opposed the overt and widespread corruption of Yanukovych and his ministers.
As a result of the protests, an agreement was signed in late February 2014 by Yanukovych that called for the creation of an interim government, constitutional reforms and early elections. Shortly after, Yanukovych and his ministers fled to Russia, and Russia annexed Crimea and the Donbas region.
