A World Of Pure Imagination

What if you could bring all of your favorite childhood characters to life and interact with them?  The Charmed Library by Jennifer Moorman takes this concept and weaves a tale of love and empowerment.  This author is new to me and I have to say, I'm not sorry I read it.  

                                                Characters: Stella Parks, Jack Mathis

Premise: One action ends up changing a woman's entire life.

I am still buzzing from this.  Even the book's blurb couldn't prepare me for this. 

            *In her best Rod Serling voice* Imagine if you will, if you could talk to your favorite book characters: the hero, the villain, the heroine, your childhood crush...that's what you get with this book.  Imagination brought to life.  

    Years after her mother Maria's disappearance and her father's death, Stella Parks is working in a library and she's always been able to see words in various colors floating around people and she enjoyed writing in journals, something she did at the encouragement of her mother, who ended up walking out on the family when she was nine, which created a lot of hurt---understandably so---and went up into her adult years and she's basically been coasting ---for lack of a better word---through her life, which understandably concerns her brother Percy (Harry Potter, anyone? 🤣), boss Arnie, and best friend, Ariel (loved the Little Mermaid reference), especially after Stella ends up burning her journal in an effort to get over her ex Wade Haynes who was divorced with kids, which I get it, it was done on spur of the moment, so yeah, as a best friend, I would've been concerned too, but at the same time, yes!  You go, girl!  Get rid of the pain!  No guy is worth holding onto like this. 

     And for whatever reason, this is a catalyst for her "gift" to go haywire and manifest in a new way which causes her pain until she writes the words down, and as if she doesn't have enough problems, she's seeing people in the library after hours that shouldn't be there, but Arnie tells her to mind her business, which, Sir, no!  It's her job to know everything about the library, she's not going to mind her business just because you tell her to.  That's just going to make her investigate, which is what she does, but it's not until Arnie has a heart attack and has to take care of the library by herself that she finds out that Arnie is bringing fictional characters out of their books for two weeks at a time (the standard check out date for library books) including a man named Jack Mathis, a character/childhood crush from her favorite book and this is done through using a magic liquid known as the breath of life and a magic stamp that's placed on the book's pages and then holding it in sunlight while he names the character that he wants to  bring forth, which, how that works, I'm not sure.  Suspension of belief, I suppose? 🤷‍♀️As it turns out, Arnie learned about this from an Irish woman who stayed with his grandparents for a time and he had gone years without using it before he dared to try it.  But of course, this is only temporary, and the characters have to return to their books or else they and their books disappear.

Okay, let's just imagine hear this: your favorite character brought to life: Fitzwillian Darcy---who did have a small role in the story and-----

------(Let's be real though, poor Fitz was painfully introverted, and he probably hated having to socialize especially with knowing that the majority of the women he was meeting just wanted him for his riches or what he could do for their social standing, which Sir, I feel ya).  But I'm digressing/drooling.

  As one can expect, Stella didn't believe this right away, but after realizing it was real, she wanted to bring out characters herself and against everyone's advice, she brought out Robinson Crusoe and Captain Hook, which caused a lot of chaos until she was able to "kill" Hook and have him return to his book, though not before Ariel found out what was going on, and admittedly, she and Stella handled it a lot better than I would've.

  Throughout all of this, Stella and Jack are getting closer and closer as they spend more and more time together and whoopsie daisy, they fall in love. (Like, no one actually saw this coming?)  I thought it was interesting to see how Jack and Stella's courtship progressed given their different backgrounds/experiences, but I had mixed feelings about their love scene fading to black.  (Part of me wanted to see the smut 🤣)

The book's other subplot for Stella is that her brother Percy has been pushing Stella to sell the family home and move to Miami to take an accounting job and has even left her brochures for colleges that specialized (for lack of a better term) in courses for a business degree, and honestly, I wish that he had been called out for this more than what we got, but to be fair, he just wanted to keep her close after everything that had happened.

As is normal for these types of stories, Wade ends up coming back to try to win Stella back and it's revealed that he wasn't actually divorced but merely separated and Stella puts him in place, saying that he couldn't string her along, which, girl, go.  Reclaim your happy.   Along with this, it's revealed that Maria herself was a fictional book character and she had left to go live it up in New York causing her book to start to disappear.

Of course, Jack's due date draws near, and not wanting to lose one another, they begin to search for a way to be together, and Stella decides to turn herself into a book character by drinking the same liquid that allows the characters to come out of their books against everyone's advice (which, Ma'am, no!  You do not drink strange liquids at all!), but thankfully she doesn't do that and instead realizes that if she uses the same process for letting the characters out of their books during the night and by moonlight, it would be permanent (which....what if she's wrong and Jack ends up disappearing?) 

 

As a whole, I enjoyed this book.  I thought it was engaging and fun with an unusual plot with an important message about not getting stuck in the past or being afraid to take chances.  That being said, I felt like the way the fictional characters were "brought to life" was a little lame without much explanation.  What gave the liquid and the stamp their powers?  Additionally, I felt like Percy got off too light and the reveal that that Stella's mother Maria was a fictional character wasn't really explored, neither was the fact that her book was disappearing.  What happens later?  Do Percy and Stella just lose all memories of their mother and think their father always raised them alone?  Therefore, I'd give it a solid 6.