To suggest that this is a book that people are either going to adore with a passion or leave utterly dry seems like an understatement. I honestly can't think of another book that requires the reader to buy into its mindset fully and immediately to enjoy properly. So let's dive in at the deep end. It's a time-honoured battle between good and evil, but this one has the side of good represented by a race of alien shapeshifting dog librarians and the side of evil taken by grumpy book burning snobs of werewolves and their grumpy book burning snobs of groupies. If that might be your cup of tea, then read on and don't be put off by the next few paragraphs. If not, this really isn't for you.

The critic in me rails at how much I can call out as demonstrably negative. Amber Polo knows what she wants to do and she does exactly that, which means that the internal reality of her world has to be shoehorned into what she wants to write rather than the other way around. Every time that something needs to be explained, she either refuses to do so or actively tells us that there simply is no explanation because that's how it works. It's magic! It just doesn't matter how magic works because it's magic. Every other page seems to contain a new convenience and six –year-olds could see through that. Human beings respond to the revelation of a supernatural world just like it's a Tuesday. Then again, they're librarians. They can deal with anything.

What's more, the good characters are only ever good and the bad characters are only ever bad, as if this is might be a novelisation of a Saturday morning cartoon, like 'Captain Planet', in which the heroes face off against another villain of the week who only ever does outrageously awful things because he's the villain. He doesn't pollute a lake as a side effect of unethical business practices; he pollutes a lake because he wants to pollute a lake and watch the fish die. Here, the werewolves don't steal books and burn libraries because they have any coherent plan to suppress information transfer; they steal books and burn libraries because they're book burning werewolves and that's what book burning werewolves do. Duh.

And, if that wasn't enough, everything works out, the various obvious sections of the finalé falling into place in every detail just like, well, unexplained magic. Everything the good guys do turns out to be an unintended prerequisite for the finalé to work, much of it obviously telegraphed. And that doesn't just mean decision X and decision Y that might have been partly guided by other hands. It means simply being in the book to begin with, however coincidental that might be, and being in a town called Shipsfeather. It means this book turning up on this page or that book appearing out of nowhere on that one. It literally means the stars aligning on a particular day.

All that said, the reader in me adored the book, because everything in it is told with a sense of joy, not just blind happiness but a real joie de vivre, an exuberant joy in being alive. Polo clearly hurls everything she loves into this book, starting with dogs and libraries but likely including what may well be every childhood memory she has, filtered through rose tinted spectacles. I would be rather shocked to find that she didn't celebrate St. Nicholas Eve as a child with wassail and gingerkuchen, poinsettias and 'Greensleeves', oranges and 'It's a Wonderful Life'. Her passion for this particular moment in time is palpable and contagious and it's but one of many examples dotted throughout this book. It could fairly be retitled 'Things I Love' by Amber Polo.

In other words, it's hard not to enjoy this book without also enjoying Polo's enjoyment at writing this book. The two become intrinsically linked and I think they have to be; because, if we can't see her joy at conjuring this Lifetime Channel-esque supernatural fantasy into being, then we have to pay more attention to the conveniences, the inevitabilities and the cartoonish sides and then the entire magical house of cards starts to tumble until we have a lot of cards with a lot of words and nothing to hold them together. It's joy that serves as the glue, both ours, if we happen to be into libraries and dogs, and Polo's as she portrays the puppetmaster, not just performing this story but watching our reactions to her performance and smiling all the deeper at every positive response.

So, assuming you're still reading, let's explore. Liberty Cutter is the young Library Director in the Ohio small town of Shipsfeather but every effort she's made for five years has been thwarted by a stubborn Library Board of Trustees, led by its chairman, Harold Dinzelbacher and a former Library Director, Elsie Dustbunnie. Liberty plans to resign in frustration but her library burns instead and a new chapter begins before she can depart the book. The building turns into a chic bistro that's run by Harold's wife and the library shifts (ha) next door to the old and long abandoned Shipsfeather Athanaeum & Academy.

And here's where things really start, because the Academy was cursed by wicked Elsie Dustbunnie and that means that the good guys, the alien dog shifters, are stuck inside the building, living in a sumptuous hidden basement, but the bad guys, the book burning werewolves, are stuck outside. And that means that the Academy turns out to be a bad move for them, because Liberty gains an element of control over her library for the first time, what with her would-be saboteurs unable to even set foot in the place. And, of course, the upstairs world of the new library eventually touches the downstairs world of the dog shifters.

I'm not quite the target audience for this book but I'm not far off. I'm a huge fan of both libraries and librarians, even if I spend more time in the one I built in our enclosed carport than the public one round the corner and up the road. I'm well aware that librarians are the best of us and their good works are far too often frustrated by those in power who don't appreciate that. Even if they aren't book burning werewolves. I also love dogs and pretty much whatever animals you put into my vision, though I'd call myself more of a cat person than a dog person, like the cataloguers that Liberty puts to work. Then again, I kind of dig werewolves too, even if I've never had one ‘round for a party. Well, maybe one.

What that means is that, even with my eyes well and truly open to the conveniences and lack of a single complicating factor to the grand scheme of things, I couldn't fail to adore this book. Now, I have read it before, a decade or so ago before I started reviewing for 'The Nameless Zine', so this is my second time through, but I found that I hadn't forgotten that much about it. I didn't recall every detail of the plot and certainly few character names, even ones as outrageous as Taxiarchai Angus Xenophon McCasson, Bliss D. Light and Julianna Eisenberg von Noir. What I remembered most was the feel; that it was a fundamentally happy book, one to make our day better, whatever it was before, one to leave us grinning like an idiot and, yes, occasionally shedding a tear.

Sure, I rolled my eyes at all the dog words and dog puns that are littered throughout the book. In fact, the very first word of the text is "Dogged" and the very next page adds "dogwoods" outside the Academy. They don't quit from there. Sure, I giggled at the list of famous people who happen to be shapeshifting dogs, from Abraham Lincoln to Queen Elizabeth II. Sure, I laughed at the fake book and magazine titles right next to real ones. Here's a copy of 'Consumer Reports', there's an 'Arsonists Gazette'.

However, I also appreciated occasional subtleties. Lloyd Wong, dog shifter architect? That's Lloyd Wright! I particularly liked major supporting characters like Lily Mumford, who the librarians first think is homeless, but turns out to be a rich old lady sharing a gigantic mansion who used to be a librarian herself. Similarly, the weird-in-a-good-way night janitor Aldwyn Chisholm grows into quite the new role. I even appreciated the fact that Shipsfeather is an anagram for Shapeshifter and for a very good reason.

In the end, it has to come back to my initial paragraph. If you're up for the basic concept here, then you know what you're getting into and you're probably going to be able to forgive the negative in return for all the positive. Yeah yeah, there's all that, but, c'mon, there's joy! And librarians. And dogs. And dog shifter librarians. From space! If you're not up for the basic concept, then this isn't remotely for you and you should steer clear. I'm primarily in the former category and firmly count this as a fond guilty pleasure.

My only affectionate complaint is about how long it takes Liberty to go downstairs. I mean, sure, she's busy establishing her library in a new location, stocking replacements, rolling out RFID tags and handling security concerns, but she's also just been told, by a talking sheepdog on less, that a shapeshifting community of dog librarians is living in her basement. How does she not explore the place immediately? I'd have been down there on night one and, if you've read this far, then I think you would too. ~~ Hal C F Astell