Like Cory Doctorow's Makers, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is filled with ideas and technology that may or may not exist yet but seem mostly plausible ... I loved diving into the world that Sloan created, both the high-tech fantasyland of Google and the ancient analog society. It's packed full of geeky allusions and wonderful characters, and is a celebration of books, whether they're made of dead trees or digits.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan, dexterously tackles the intersection between old technologies and new with a novel that is part love letter to books, part technological meditation, part thrilling adventure, part requiem ... Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is eminently enjoyable, full of warmth and intelligence. Sloan balances a strong plot with philosophical questions about technology and books and the power both contain. The prose maintains an engaging pace as Clay, Mr. Penumbra and the quirky constellation of people around them try to determine what matters more — the solution to a problem or how that solution is achieved ... this novel would have been even stronger had some of that intrigue and discomfort seeped more deeply into the prose ... Instead, the book suffers from an excess of convenience — for every problem, a clever solution ... Sloan effortlessly marries new ideas with old without realizing that all too often, the cleverness overwhelms the story.
The narrative voice is what makes these opening pages so engaging: smart, hip and witty, like the shiny surface of a new iPhone. (Sloan used to work for Twitter.) If glib, the narrative is warm, too, and self-effacing, peppered with ironies ... This is a book about systems, both secret and overt, exploring codes, filing, programming and designing. Storytelling has its operating systems, too, and though the author creates a splendid opening and an acceptable resolution, he runs out of steam for the great engine system of the middle. The weakness may be in the development of character. Clay is hardly changed by his experience; and for a book making a large statement about friendship, his friends always come in and out of the story on the basis of utility rather than affection or humanity.
...one of the most thoughtful and fun reading experiences you're likely to have this year ... It's a convoluted plot that relies a little too heavily on convenient coincidences, but Sloan pulls it off with his extremely charismatic prose. He's a deeply funny writer ... Perhaps the biggest problem with Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is its epilogue, which ties up the book's loose ends far too neatly. If it weren't for the perfectly rendered last paragraph, Sloan's closing pages could have been a disaster, badly marring an otherwise fine novel ... But there's so much large-hearted magic in the book, it seems almost petty to complain. Sloan is remarkably gifted and has an obviously deep affection for both literature and technology ... At its best, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore reminds us of the miracle of reading, no matter how you choose to do it.
It’s all very hipster, which might be annoying were it not for Sloan’s lightness of touch. This is a world in which a man can own an early edition Kindle, 'so uncool it’s cool again', a place where Google is 'developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris', and where a breathy description of the internet giant’s headquarters is leavened by the appearance of 'a tall dude with blue dreadlocks pedalling a unicycle' ... And if, in the end, the plot doesn’t entirely satisfy – the love story is a little weak, the 500-year old mystery rather too neatly solved – this novel’s ideas will linger long in the mind.
...worth a read for anyone who has wondered about the epochal changes wrought by the digital revolution — though it may come across as a bit unsatisfying to those who like their characters deeply and intricately portrayed ... Big societal questions vein the book, but never push themselves rudely to the forefront at the expense of the story ... In fact, everything here exists solely in service to the story. The writing in Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore' is hip and amusing but make no mistake; this book is all about plot, not character ... Moreover, many of the characters suffer from a little cartoonish flatness, and sometimes seem mere levers to help move the plot along ... In the end, though, the book works fine as an engrossing mystery — and as an intelligent meditation on technology's trajectory and limits.
...The Da Vinci Code for typography nerds ... Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore could be a drab, whiny affair, bemoaning the loss of physical books, the rise of a Kindle nation, and the impersonal Internet library pioneered by Google, then exploited for advertising revenue. Instead, it rolls along at a nice clip, progressing through the mystery behind the library with inspired humor. Sloan’s depiction of startup culture in San Francisco is positively dead-on and bitingly funny, and taking the story to Google’s Mountain View campus offers plenty of opportunities to poke holes in the puffed-up egos of the digital behemoth ... the novel rides the borderline of the print/digital divide without tipping its hand in preference too heavily either way. It’s overly serious in spots, particular Clay’s meandering pontifications, but that doesn’t get in the way of some serious fun unraveling a compelling mystery.
While Sloan seems justifiably fascinated by this disagreement and the process of scanning and copying, in the end he seems to skirt many of the novel’s questions about how digitizing art changes it. Instead, when Clay does find an answer to the puzzle of the secret society’s books, it relies on a gimmick, one I thought too cheap (even though it does involve fonts—the book, by the way, is a must-read for typography nerds). And then Sloan ends in a rush to tie up loose ends, a move that seemed at odds with Mr. Penumbra’s more thoughtful first half ... It’s unfortunate that Sloan misses an opportunity to get at some way the two camps might bridge their differences.
...a fast read and a clever book ... Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore is a hyperactive and plot-driven book. In fact, it’s really a young adult novel for adults. And it works fairly well as one. There are many flaws, however. They include: character motivations that sometimes don’t make sense, stilted dialogue, and unnecessary interjections of interior monologue. There is also too much corporate shilling and Google-love for my taste ... In the end, in a novel buoyant to the point of giddiness, some answers come from unexpected places.
Like The Shadow of the Wind, to which this text bears a deceptive resemblance, Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is at its very best when it taps into our love of literature—and at its very best, it is as remarkable a novel as Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s first for adult audiences: a cryptic diptych, equally smart and sweet, warm and honest, esoteric, intriguing, and wonderfully witty ... Sadly, Sloan struggles to sustain the most effective elements of his debut, indulging instead in lengthy love letters to the aforementioned gods of tomorrow’s technology—among a number of less distracting digressions. That said, these occur so often, and over the course of such a short novel, that an alarming proportion of the whole seems composed of packing peanuts.
In Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, set in a quirky quasi-real but also semi-surreal version of the Bay Area, the magical, the technological, the absurd and the imaginary all fuse. The result is a jaunty, surprisingly old-fashioned fantasy about the places where old and new ways of accessing knowledge meet ... the plot becomes quite familiar, as if lifted from a template we would all recognize. At times, unfortunately, this template itself seems to flirt with cliche. Although this book cleverly uses the technological age in the service of its fantasy, a great deal of what is written here hasn't really upgraded its own narrative operating system ... In fact, at times, the sorts of mysteries that are uncovered feel a tad rote - a totally pleasant cartoon, but not a particularly new one. And given that this book is actually speaking to a rather urgent current question about the battle between old and new forms of knowledge, at times not quite enough complexity is at stake ... Even though this book is familiar in ways, it is pleasurable, too. Sloan's ultimate answer to the mystery of what keeps people solving Penumbra's puzzle is worth turning pages to find out.
Robin Sloan’s funny debut novel, em>Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, is both a celebration and a send-up of the clashing worlds of technology and those who cling to dead-tree books ... Though there’s a code to be cracked in these pages, the real treat of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is Sloan’s energetic storytelling—and the many, many lines that you will surely want to share on Facebook and tweet to the masses ... Readers who don’t know a hashtag from a wiki will still appreciate the book’s ultimate message about friendship, and the conclusion that nothing—not even a world full of programmers and hackers—can substitute for a cunning mind.
For those who fear that the Internet/e-readers/whatever-form-of-technological-upheaval-is-coming has killed or will kill paper and ink, Sloan’s debut novel will come as good news ... Like all questing heroes, Clay takes on more than he bargained for and learns more than he expected, not least about himself. His story is an old-fashioned tale likably reconceived for the digital age, with the happy message that ingenuity and friendship translate across centuries and data platforms.
Sloan’s debut novel takes the reader on a dazzling and flat-out fun adventure, winding through the interstices between the literary and the digital realms ... From the shadows of Penumbra’s bookshelves to the brightly lit constellation of cyberspace to the depths of a subterranean library, Sloan deftly wields the magicks (definitely with a 'k') of the electronic and the literary in this intricate mystery.
