Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Not a ton to review here. I don't generally knock books for being derivative—smart writers can do a lot of exciting things with established forms or narratives—but unfortunately, Robin Sloan doesn't. Maybe I'm not the target audience? I'm not sure what readers are meant to get out of this: the common fantasy tropes are so thinly veiled that even the protagonist makes repeated reference to them as they happen.

Clay Jannon gets fired from his cringe design job and takes up as the clerk of a bookstore in San Francisco. It turns out that the bookstore is a front for a shadowy Secret Society with sinister vibes but which, it turns out, doesn't actually do anything but own a typeface and write a lot of autobiographies that no one reads. There's some weak inciting action and Clay has to rely on all of his friends to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding an encrypted old book. He does so, eventually.

Google, the multi-trillion dollar advertising company, makes continuous and gratuitous appearances that in no way holds them to account. Characters get extended descriptions of what clothes they're wearing in lieu of proper development. Clay's love interest exists exclusively as a reason to go into Google's offices. Her personality is that she wears a red shirt that makes her boobs look good. Oh and Clay's Ron Weasley is a tech founder for a company that models boob physics. He is Clay's closest friend and his work is portrayed as being a bit funny but fundamentally toothless and also very lucrative. He spends most of the novel spending money and chatting up girls about how great boobs are. Boobs take up an inordinate amount of space in this book, which is ostensibly about secret societies at the intersection of art and technology, or whatever it was that Steve Jobs said that time.

Peak 2012 content.

Further reading: this comment about how Harry Potter would read if written in the style of this book.