The chapter titles looked to me like they were going for a Dewey Decimal system feel... and upon further searching, I realized that the titles were actual categories of the system itself.
Chapter one is titled: 021.1 Library Relationships
Chapter two is 041.4 Biographies in American English
There's a chapter titled 302.7 Social Interaction
And if the Wiki page is any indication of fact at all, the chapter titles are taken straight from the Dewey Decimal classification system. Hmm... is all I have to say. I might appreciate it a little later on if, say, the content of each chapter corresponds accordingly with the classification title its been assigned... maybe.
Anyway...
This was certainly a pretty good start as a first chapter -- slightly monotonous, yet at the same time it was progressive of the story line and included enough detailed description that I had actually FELT the atmosphere of little Verdant, Kansas even as D.J. was pulling into the little library. Not bad.
Even with brief introductions, the characters were... well, they were quite the characters. Immediate bad impression and off to a bad start with the stand-in librarian, Amelia Grundler (of whom D.J. will be swooping in and replacing); the quite eccentrically... um... purple (?) Viv Sanderson with her seemingly flittery, butterfly of a personality... It will be interesting to watch how D.J. continues to interact with and develop relations with the rest of the small town's people.
Although I AM jealous that what sounds like a rather small town in Kansas sounds like it has an even larger library (and two bookmobiles) than where I live in one of the larger Kansas cities.
Finally:
"The place was eerie, spooky, unwelcoming. Outside it had been all Andrew Carnegie. Inside it was all Tim Burton."
I don't know about Andrew Carnegie (those libraries DO look nice), but this description isn't bad. A library that can channel Tim Burton? I'm actually rather intrigued and am even more jealous that all the libraries in my city are simple, cozy and somewhat commercialized... even though the one down the street DOES have a sitting area and what might be a fireplace... I think. Too bad this isn't a paranormal ghost story type, otherwise a Tim Burton-esque library might have been kind of fun to set the mood with.
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