Book Review: The Woman in the Library | Sulari Gentill

Uniquely crafted and intricately plotted, The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill begins with a scream heard in a library and takes the reader on a journey of a book within a book where you’ll be questioning what is fact and what is fiction. Brilliant!

About the Book

In every person’s story, there is something to hide…

The ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is quiet, until the tranquility is shattered by a woman’s terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who’d happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.

Award-winning author Sulari Gentill delivers a sharply thrilling read with The Woman in the Library, an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure that examines the complicated nature of friendship and shows us that words can be the most treacherous weapons of all.

Reflection

Centered around a classic whodunnit story featuring a group of strangers who meet in the Boston Public Library and are bonded by an unexpected scream breaking the silence of the reading room, Gentill’s The Woman in the Library weaves in two equally compelling stories unfolding simultaneously across the page. The prose has a lightness that keeps the book bouncing forward as I was drawn into the two stories.

Author Hannah Tigone is working on a new novel and corresponding with fan-turned-friend Leo, who lives in the Boston area and is writing to Hannah with his thoughts on each new chapter of her novel. In each section, Hannah sends Leo a chapter and the readers gets both the fictional narrative plus Leo’s response, which blends criticism and thoughts on the chapter as well as tidbits about his and Hannah’s current situations.

Leo often provides insights into parts in Hannah’s story which don’t ring true to American culture, being that Hannah is writing from her home in Australia. Meanwhile in Hannah’s book, her leading lady Freddie is befriending the strangers from the library as mysterious events unfold around her. As Freddie’s story escalates, so does the correspondence between Leo and Hannah about the book and their friendship as well. In Hannah’s book, someone is a murderer. But what about the characters based on the four in Freddie’s book? And what elements from Hannah’s own life appear in hers or Freddie’s stories?

Lines blur as things escalate in each of the stories, and Leo enters Hannah’s book as a character himself. But things begin to get complicated and the reader will wonder where fiction ends and becomes reality.

I read this with one of my book clubs and it was interesting chatting as we read because some of us were more interested in Hannah and Leo, while others were more interested in the characters in Hannah’s novel. There are so many quirky bits to the book. Leo becomes increasingly worried about Hannah not writing the pandemic into her story and the book seeming outdated before it is published. Meanwhile in Hannah’s book, a the cast of characters continues to grow and delight, with a particularly funny side story with one of Freddie’s neighbors.

At times I got a bit mixed up with which elements were Hannah’s in life, in Hannah’s book about Freddie, or in Freddie’s book about the strangers from the library. The ending delighted me! I found the entire book so unique and delicately woven together. Freddie often compares her own writing style to that of a bus, where there is a route but no real plan of who will hop on and hop off. That is how I recommend approaching this as a reader. Enjoy the ride, allow the characters to hop off and on, and don’t be too worried about what exactly is the destination!