Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel

Twelve Stars Out of Ten Some books entertain you. Some books teach you something new. And some books feel like they were written just for you—like they recognize something in you that maybe even you didn’t quite know how to name. That’s what Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore did for me. This novel is a warm, clever, heart-tugging blend of mystery, technology, history, and bibliophilia. It’s about a dusty San Francisco bookstore that hides a secret, a curious young man who takes a night shift job there, and the unraveling of a literary puzzle that stretches back centuries. It plays with codebreaking, typography, Google, secret societies, friendship, and the eternal question: will the digital age kill the printed word—or can they evolve together? I loved every moment of it. Not just because it was smart, funny, and compulsively readable, but because it echoed something deeply personal in me. My mother was a librarian and a bookbinder. She worked in special collections at the Zimmerman Library, restoring old books—fragile, faded things that most people would be afraid to touch, let alone repair. But my mother wasn’t most people. She treated books like living things: patiently, reverently, with a sense of purpose. And at home? She was a reader with a voracious appetite for mystery. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Tony Hillerman, Ngaio Marsh, Arthur Conan Doyle, Freeman Wills Crofts, Anthony Berkeley, G.K. Chesterton—these were the voices of my childhood. She raised me among stories where the world could be made right again if you were clever, persistent, and just a little bit kind. Reading Penumbra was like being wrapped in a warm cloak of nostalgia and wonder. It’s a modern story, sure, with search engines and digital archives, but at its heart it shares the same DNA as those golden-age mysteries. There's a puzzle to solve, a secret society to decode, and at every turn, the quiet reassurance that books—real, physical, cherished books—still matter. The past is not obsolete; it’s the operating system we’re still running, even as we update. There’s a photo I took that captures what this book meant to me. In one hand, I’m holding a Kindle open to a passage from Tennyson’s In Memoriam—his grief and beauty humming off the screen. Beneath it lies my 1886 edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, a leather-bound treasure embossed with gold and etched with ivy. Old and new, screen and paper, heart and history, coexisting in harmony. That’s Penumbra in a single image. (A pity that bookclubs.com does not let you post photos in reviews...) That line on the Kindle screen from “In Memoriam”: “To put in words the grief I feel / For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within.” That could've been a Penumbra quote. Timeless. I think my mother would’ve adored this novel. She would have loved the secret codes, the reverence for typography, the sly humor. She would have smiled at the idea of a bookstore that never closes. She would have wanted to peek behind the shelves, to touch the spine of the Codex Vitae. And she would have nodded with quiet satisfaction at the novel’s conclusion—that even in a digital world, what matters most is people. Community. Curiosity. And the timeless joy of turning the page. So yes, twelve stars out of ten. Maybe fourteen. Because some books don’t just tell a story—they honor your story. And in doing so, they become more than fiction. They become keepsakes of the soul.

4.0

Fun quirky adventure. Great on audio. After listening search Reddit for an Easter egg.

This was an ODD book but I ended up really enjoying it. Can technology solve a puzzle that has been unbroken for years? How the unlikely group of friends works together to figure out the mystery of Mr P's bookshop and what exactly these strange characters are doing with the odd tomes they are checking out.

I don't think this is a bad book, just uninteresting (for me). I did like the narrator, he is quite good. At first I thought it might develop into a modern day "Shadow of the Wind", but it just didn't.