Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Come on board for a magical road trip on a mobile library.
Mobile Library
What you need to know before your trail
This is a story which starts at the end. A mobile library is parked at the edge of a cliff surrounded by police. Inside there are three people – Bobby, Rosa and Val. How did they get there and why are they there? The story unravels as it rewinds to the start of the journey.
Bobby is only twelve but he yearns for the day his mum will come back. Living with his father and his father’s girlfriend, he collects everything he can about her. When he meets single mum Val and daughter Rosa, she introduces him to the mobile library where Val works as a cleaner and the summer is spent in bookish heaven. But then trouble strikes, and the only way out is to start that engine and to take to the road with the books in tow.
Travel Guide
A mobile library. A van full of books. The ability to take these fictional worlds with you wherever you go. Books. More books. Quite a journey. Never will you ask ‘ Are we nearly there yet” as this is a bookish journey you will not want to end.
Bobby, Val and Rosa spend a magical summer together, discovering the books in the mobile library and just enjoying reading them and spending time with each other.
The mobile library is as any other library, a place to escape to. The world in side the library can be anything you want it to be and you can open the door to a new world just by opening a book cover.
Aah the library –
“the walls were lined with escape routes and exits, to deserts, space and oceans and to stranger places still”
Bobby is bullied at school and although his friend Sonny tries to help, he ends up in hospital and then seems to disappear. For Bobby, this library then becomes more than a haven and means of escape but a way of finding Sonny again.
The ultimate road trip
This is the road trip for booklovers as Bobby reads books from the library and takes the lessons and morals of that book and applies it to his own life. Books carry messages and can comfort you in your time of need. And Bobby has some good friends from Harry Potter, Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick.
Like the best road movies, as the mobile library bumps and jolts its way along the highways, the twist and turns of the road mirror the lessons the passengers learn about love and life and that essentially home is where the heart is.
The Mobile library tries to stay one step ahead of the law and even takes on a passenger but it’s the road trip and the search for Sonny that is the real destination.
Booktrailer Review
Susan:
I love this book. There that’s it. I could talk about it for hours but those four words sum up exactly what I think and feel. I have read it dozens of times and discover something new each time. How lovely an idea to use books to work out your own journey in life, to discover what a love of books can do and to travel along on a journey with literary friends as companions. This really resonated with me as I spent weeks in a camper van once travelling to literary locations and this felt like I was back there. Such a magical time and adventure and I now need a mobile library to recreate this book.
Even the dark and serious sections of the book were excellently drawn and this was definitely a journey in more ways than one.
Bookish people everywhere? you need this in your life.
Where Next?
