Portable Childhoods: "In the House of the Seven Librarians"

The final story in Portable Childhoods is the story "In the House of the Seven Librarians", the story of what happens in a small library when a big budget new library opens across town. The story, of course, is not really about that. The story is about a girl named Dinsy who was given to this library as payment for decades of an overdue library fine. Dinsy is raised by the seven librarians who stayed behind at the old library.

The story follows most of Dinsy's life as she grows up into a young woman, it follows the stages of growing up from child-eyed wonder to irritable teenager to a strong young woman. All in a library nobody leaves. Must be a decent sized library.

I'm not sure the best way to describe this story, except that this is a delightful look inside a library and teems with working knowledge of library catalogs and books and with the love of both.

"In the House of the Seven Librarians" is not a perfect story, and it not one of the best stories in the collection, but it is very much fitting with the rest of the collection. It fits. It's enough.