Eric Hobbs

This is a book I picked up as a Kindle deal because I like stories set in libraries. This is a pretty imaginative one. Wesley is a bookish boy bullied by his peers with one true friend Taylor. On a class trip to their town's mysterious library, Wes and Tay discover that the library offers portals into books. A Lost Boy from Peter Pan joins them as they hide from villains by entering The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It's kind of a young adult fiction take on Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, show more although with a less-engaging writing style. Still, the book was interesting enough to keep me turning the pages show less

This is one of those free ebooks that ended up on my Kindle. I'm sure the author was hoping that this would be the beginning of a highly popular middle school fantasy series. However, despite some intriguing plot elements, the characters are purely stock, both protagonists and villains, and the writing pedestrian.

Initially I had difficulty getting into this story. While it seemed well conceived, something about the surface execution was a bit off-putting. In terms of genre, the best I can do is say that it does for the Wizard of Oz what Lev Grossman's The Magician did for/to the Narnia series. There too it took several volumes before I saw the reworked source material as more than lazy writing, cribbing from an existing mythology.

Now that I've read more, the disconcerting part is that he does a much show more better job writing adults, even fictional ones, than children. They invariably sound petulant and irrational. show less

The Librarian series by Eric Hobbs takes place, unsurprisingly, in a library. This isn’t a typical library, however. It’s one of those magical libraries that was there before the town was even settled. Not only that, but the strange carvings lining the walls are portraits to other worlds.

While this would be intriguing in something written by H. P. Lovecraft, or even any notable Children’s author, Hobbs takes an interesting idea and falls flat on it by bloating his narrative with show more exposition, juvenile humor, and inconsistent characters. The plot, I admit, was delightful, and that alone (added to my compulsion to finish every book I start) helped me reach the end of this book.

The story invokes the works of Barrie and Baum, among others, but does no more than provide tarnished glimpses into these worlds, like trying to read the next page in a book through the translucent page before it. While Neverland and Oz are both featured, they’re dead in the hands of Hobbs, lifeless zombie worlds that just go through the superficial motions, but otherwise just shamble along. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I can tell from reading this book that Hobbs has some appreciation of the books he references, and that he wishes to join that pantheon. However, with the weakness in his writing, he has pretty stiff competition from many of the modern talents, as well as the not-yet-classic-but-almost forebears that probably weren’t featured in this book since they aren’t yet in the public domain.

It’s no surprise to me that the main character of this story is an under-appreciated young writer. His name isn’t Mary Sue, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s who he was.

If you’re looking for something for your kids to read, please start on those trails that have been blazed before. Barrie, Baum, Carroll, Kipling, all these tales are ageless fodder for flourishing minds. Hobbs, however, needs to devote some extra work to polishing his prose before he can see himself among his literary heroes. show less