In the House of the Seven Librarians

''Once upon a time, the Carnegie Library sat on a wooded bluff on the east side of town: red brick and fieldstone, with turrets and broad windows facing the trees. Inside, green glass-shaded lamps cast warm yellow light onto oak tables ringed with spindle-backed chairs…'' So begins the delicious tale of what happens when an old Carnegie library is closed and its seven librarians refuse to abandon it. They lock the doors, and a forest grows around them like a cloak, sheltering them from the rest of the world. But their lives are changed when a book of fairy tales is found in the Book Drop, very, very overdue and the payment accompanying it is a first-born child.

In the House of the Seven Librarians is a timeless tale for anyone who spent a childhood in the refuge of the public library, or who believes that a world full of books is a truly magical place. And as Margo Lanagan, author of Tender Morsels, has noted, ''Ellen Klages writes like a dream--a dream from which you wake up laughing, and that fills the rest of the day with its strangeness and sweetness.''