Our protagonist Otaha is a new employee at a quirky library - one that only collects the collections of deceased authors. The story is about the first few months of Otaha's experience working at the library - meeting her colleagues, encountering some quirky customers, and discovering the secret behind the owner.

I finished it quite quickly - there was something charming and disarming about the writing. There wasn't much drama, tension, or, frankly, anything remotely negative. The story flowed smoothly, and it was interesting to see where the author was taking it.

That being said, the experience overall was a bit hollow. While the initial concept is intriguing, the author did a poor job of developing the characters, making the mystery of the library's owner richer, or creating a coherent storyline that tied enough of the subplots together. As it stands, there were just too many diversions from the main storyline (the stories of some, but not all, of the other employees), the mystery became a proper mystery only in the last few "episodes" of the book (and didn't really make me care enough), and the characters remained rather banal. The supposed peak was supposed to come with the story of the library's manager and his relationship to the proprietor - but it just wasn't interesting or exciting. This is why, for me, it was a nice enough read, but it left me with literally nothing.

A pleasant enough waste of time. It's a miss, from my perspective.

I thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Otaha Higuchi has been desperate to work with books as a career all her life. So much so, that she endured a miserable period working at a chain book store before receiving a mysterious offer from the unknown owner of the Night Library, thanks to her bookish blog.

After accepting the offer largely on faith, Otaha arrives at a nondescript building tucked away in a Tokyo suburb to find a most unusual workplace, with a chef who provides delicious daily dinners, an eccentric cast of coworkers, and very odd working hours.

She also discovers a found family of sorts, a magical library that deals with the personal collections donated by authors, and what would have been her dream job, except that she had not dreamed of something so unusual!

A charming, gently told story that will appeal to booklovers everywhere, this gets 3.5 stars.