Editorial Content for How Can I Help You
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Reviewer (text)
If you're a book lover, chances are you have a fond memory of a kindly, knowledgeable or just plain cool librarian who helped ignite your love of reading. Let's just say that the library workers portrayed in Laura Sims' HOW CAN I HELP YOU are not like that at all. And at least one of them might not turn you on to books --- she might just turn on you.
Margo has been working at the Carlyle Public Library for the past two years. She doesn't have a library degree, but that's ok. Most days, she's perfectly happy serving as a circulation clerk, even if the work doesn't always give her the same kind of satisfaction she found in her former career. She was once a nurse named Jane but was forced to leave her profession after Donna, another nurse she trusted, saw her interactions with a patient and started asking too many questions --- questions that also had been raised at the prior hospitals where Jane worked. Eventually, she had no choice but to drive halfway across the country, change her name and forget all about her former life. Sort of.
"Fans of novels with unreliable narrators will want to pick up this thriller as they'll get two for the price of one. Plus, anyone who has ever worked or spent time in a public library will find much to delight in here."
Just when Margo feels like nothing will ever change at the library, the director informs the staff that due to budget increases, they finally can fill the vacant reference librarian position. Margo is both intrigued and repelled by Patricia, the new librarian, who reminds her in some ways of Donna. Can she trust this person even though her trust in Donna was once misplaced?
As for Patricia, she's hiding her own secrets. Although she does in fact have professional training as a librarian, she's returning reluctantly to the profession after trying and failing to make it as a novelist. But as she observes Margo --- and especially after taking note of Margo's unsettling response to finding a dying woman in the library's restroom --- Patricia finds herself wondering if maybe a novel-worthy character hasn't landed in her life after all.
HOW CAN I HELP YOU unfolds in overlapping narratives from the points of view of both Margo and Patricia. At first, these portions are long, more like character studies. But as their lives and fates grow increasingly intertwined, so do their narrative sections, until the novel's final chapters flip back and forth every couple of pages as the story reaches its chilling conclusion. At times, Margo and Patricia narrate the same events from their own perspectives. Sims effectively gives the reader new information each time so that these plot points become insightful and surprising rather than repetitious.
Fans of novels with unreliable narrators will want to pick up this thriller as they'll get two for the price of one. Plus, anyone who has ever worked or spent time in a public library will find much to delight in here. Sims clearly revels in portraying certain patron and staff "types” almost as much as she imagines how they might meet a tragic fate.
Teaser
No one knows Margo’s real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library know only her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges. That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo’s subtly sinister edge and watches her carefully. When a tragic incident in the library bathroom gives her a hint of Margo’s mysterious past, Patricia can’t resist digging deeper --- even as her new fixation becomes all-consuming and sends both women hurtling toward disaster.
Promo
No one knows Margo’s real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library know only her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges. That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo’s subtly sinister edge and watches her carefully. When a tragic incident in the library bathroom gives her a hint of Margo’s mysterious past, Patricia can’t resist digging deeper --- even as her new fixation becomes all-consuming and sends both women hurtling toward disaster.
About the Book
The lives of two librarians become dangerously intertwined in this razor-sharp exploration of human nature and the lure of artistic obsession.
No one knows Margo’s real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library know only her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges.
That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo’s subtly sinister edge and watches her carefully. When a tragic incident in the library bathroom gives her a hint of Margo’s mysterious past, Patricia can’t resist digging deeper --- even as her new fixation becomes all-consuming and sends both women hurtling toward disaster.
Chilling, incisive and darkly humorous, HOW CAN I HELP YOU is a propulsive work of psychological suspense that asks how far we might go to justify our most monstrous desires.
Audiobook available, read by Carlotta Brentan and Maggi-Meg Reed
