Kekla Magoon is best known for her award-winning realistic and history books like How it Went Down and Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People. I, however, first read and loved her magical Robyn Hoodlum Adventure series, beginning with Shadows of Sherwood, and was thrilled to see another fantasy from her.

The Secret Library
by Kekla Magoon
Read by Nekia Renee Martin

Candlewick/Listening Library, 2024.

ISBN 978-1536230888

Listened to audiobook on Libby.

Dally craves a life of adventure – something she had with her late grandfather. Now, though, her mother has all of Dally’s time outside of school scheduled with business lessons, to prepare her to take over the family firm. When her mother refuses to let her join the afterschool Adventure Club, Dally secretly finds and reads the letter her grandfather wrote for her to read after she reached adulthood. Following the clues in the letter, Dally is able to find the Secret Library. Reading this title, you’d be tempted, as I first was, to stress the second word to make it clear that the library is a secret. And the library is a secret, visible only to people who know it’s there and look for it the right way. But the library is also a secret library, housing secrets of people throughout time and across the world. They sit on the shelves in categories like “Family Secrets” and “Hidden for Your Own Good”, looking like books whose size varies based on the length of the secret.

But when taken to the private reading room and opened, the secrets open up into full experiences, taking Dally into her own family’s past. Some of them, like seeing her Black father and white mother meet for the first time, she experiences by herself, sneaking around the edges of the memory without talking to the people in the memory. Some are adventures that last for days, taking her on journeys with a pirate crew, often meeting a boy named Jack just a few years older than Dally. It’s not clear from the beginning how all of these connect to Dally herself, but she’s often having too much of an adventure to do more than wonder. We see points of the past including the 1860s, 1930s, 50s, earlier 2000s, and parts of Dally’s own life from other points of view – those shedding particular light on her mother. By the end of the travels we see, Dally has learned things that make her see her family in a whole new light, some I saw coming and some I didn’t.

The idea is sound one, and the exploration is a lot of fun. I had some issues with the timeline, especially the 1860s pirate ship adventures over a century after the end of the golden age of piracy, as well as lining up the generations. The ending, too, was not at all what I expected, though I won’t say much about that to avoid spoilers. I’ll just say that I wonder if it’s partly me as a mother that really wanted an improved relationship between Dally and her mother that never came. I’m guessing younger readers will have less of an expectation around that. I still really appreciated Dally’s experiencing of herself as a biracial girl in multiple time periods, and looking at different interracial couples over the very long time span she witnesses. There is also a major character who doesn’t go by the gender they were assigned at birth, though the time period is different enough that “trans” doesn’t quite seem to apply. Narrator Nekia Renee Martin read the characters with unique and distinguishable voices – my only gripe was that she consistently said “secret library” when the text clearly said it was a “secret library.” That’s a small complaint for the overall quality of the book, though. I’m still struggling to figure out how I feel about the ending of the book – but I enjoyed the people, adventures, and insights on the way.