This book started out great and I sympathized with the main character who was suddenly put in charge when her boss had a stroke.

I did not really think it was a much of a mystery at all. I also never really felt a deep connection to any of the characters.

A quick read that would be interesting to those who like stories about old books and libraries for sure!

Thanks to Net Galley, the publisher and author for the ARC of this book.

What a remarkable story! I enjoyed trying to figure out the mystery behind this book - and the books within it that needed to be found!

The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections follows Liesel, a librarian who has recently moved into the role of Acting Chair of the special libraries, given the sudden stroke of her boss. At a donor event, she tries to get into her boss's safe to bring out a newly-acquired rare book, only to find it missing. The story follows Liesel's journey as she tries to uncover the mystery of where the book has gone, learning more about the people she works with as she goes.

What I found so interesting about this book was the pressure that was put on Liesel's character; not uncommon for women in an academic setting. Jurczyk captures the environment of working in this type of library setting so well, with the pressure for fundraising from the university's president down to the drama between staff members.

I have a friend who is a special collections librarian who I know will enjoy this book - as will all readers who enjoy books about books!

I love a book about books. This one was especially enjoyable as I learned about the rare book world and the life of a university librarian as she tries to solve the mystery of the disappearance of a couple of rare books from the university's collection. At first, I didn't really care for the character of Liesl. She was weak and wouldn't stand up for herself, but as she grappled with several situations in the novel, she really came into her own. By the end of the novel, she was a strong character who stood on her own two feet and didn't care what others thought. Thank you NetGalley for this ARC.

When her boss is unexpectedly hospitalized with a stoke, Liesl Weiss finds herself thrust into the role of department head of her university's distinguished rare books library. The library has recently obtained an important acquisition that is being stored for insurance purposes in a safe that only her boss knows the combination to. But when the combination is obtained from his wife, the contents of the safe are shockingly missing! Have the missing volumes been stolen? When she cleaned the office, did Liesl accidentally have the staff reshelve them? What do you do when you can't find a set of books valued at £500,000?

Under pressure from the university president and some of her coworkers, Liesl holds off on reporting the lost volumes to the police against her better judgment. The library staff begin systematically searching the archives....and realizes other important works are missing. And then one of the staff members goes missing.

I read this book in a single sitting. I didn't even stop for lunch, and that's saying something. The story moves at a fast pace and is punctuated by brief flashbacks to events that took place in the library in previous years, revealing a little more about each staff member and their collective history. Everyone is a plausible suspect...

This was a really fun read, especially for a public librarian who sometimes daydreams about what life would be like if she'd gone into the archives of academia instead.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC. Liesl has to take over for the director of the department after he has a stroke. Days before, he procured a vary rare and expensive book from an auction that should be in the safe. When Liesl finds out that it is not, she starts investigating. At the same time, a librarian goes missing as well as another rare book. I didn't care for this book. It was dark and depressing with people missing, people dying and books disappearing. It wasn't a mystery as much as it was just a story. #thedepartmentofrarebooksandspecialcollections #evajurczyk #jan2022

A well paced and immersive story. I enjoyed the plot as well as the way the details were shared and withheld in turn. A nice read.

I really enjoyed this book. The university library is a fantastic place to fill characters for a story, and characters this book has. It’s a mystery with a nice dose of intriguing research into rare books. While this book strives to solve a mystery (which it does), it was a lot more than that. This is a character driven book full of flawed but mostly well-meaning characters. Leisl was easy to like and hope for, even when her choices weren’t ideal. In a book about about the history of old books, we also are taken back into the history of the lives of these interconnected characters.

Department of Rare books and Special Collections was an excellent read. The book was well written, suspenseful and had a story line I had not come upon before. It was fascinating to learn about the inner workings of rare book acquisitions and care. Many times I not only felt like I was in the library, I swear I could smell all those old books. It was lovely being with characters who loved books too.
Someone has been stealing rare and old valuable books. Books that were usually one of a few that had survived the centuries, When the director of the rare books department has a heart attack , his assistant Liesl has to step in. To her horror a rare book goes missing and everything starts to fall apart.
Thank you NetGalley for this book. It was outstanding!

This book about books was okay but not spectacular. When the main character, a female, continues to doubt herself, that she’s as good as a man, it degrades the quality of the content of the whole book.

The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections is a slow, academic literary mystery that displays some interesting facts but is ultimately not all that mysterious.

The head of the university’s rare books department has had a stroke, and his assistant, Liesl Weiss, is reluctantly called back from her sabbatical to take over. Things quickly go from bad to worse when Liesl discovers the department’s newest acquisition has gone missing, and one of her coworkers is the likeliest suspect. As Liesl works to find the manuscript, she must delicately balance her new role with getting answers about the disappearance, even if that means uncovering answers she’d rather went undiscovered.

I had fairly high hopes for this book. I’m a fan of books about books, and the disappearance of a priceless manuscript at a library had fun Nancy Drew vibes. Unfortunately, TDoRBaSC is slow and distracting, with several subplots that either fade out or fall flat.

Liesl is a rather mousy main character, which works to a degree in making her feel like the largely behind-the-scenes assistant, but it also means that she’s not very proactive, which slows down the narrative. The rest of the cast is pretty mousy as well, and I often found myself mixing up characters because they didn’t have much personality. On top of that, the mystery is sort of a dud; I called the culprit pretty early on, and Liesl solves the case before the end, making the ending feel a bit unnecessary.

What I did like about this book were the descriptions of the manuscripts and the preservation process. It was interesting to see how the rare books were handled and to get a (fictional) history on the library’s most prized books as well as to go with Liesl to see how rare books were acquired for the collection. Less interesting were her interactions with the donors, who I found to be obnoxious, but it may have just been the way those scenes were written, since Liesl didn’t like dealing with the donors, either.

Although the mystery started off with promise, the slow narrative, the uninspiring characters, and the tedious subplots dragged this book down. Some parts are interesting, but overall the feeling I got from this book was depressing, and that’s never how I want to feel when I finish a book. The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections was, sadly, a miss for me.

While the story was interesting at times, the main character was a woman who was portrayed as week. She spent a lot of her time worrying about what others thought and thinking herself that she was not as good as a man. By the end of the story she grew stronger but I was still left feeling a little disappointed.

An amazing book, a quiet book with a plot that screams from the pages. The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections is an amazing story Liesl is a character you root for from the beginning.

A charming book about rare books, librarians, and all the juicy politics behind the mysterious doors of a prestigious library of an university. The catchy title, the fun cover art immediately caught my attention.

Overall, I liked the book, but there wasn't much elements to make this a mystery read (and I just noticed Poisoned Pen Press advertised on Netgallery as a woman fiction. Ah, now that makes more sense!) If I read the book without the assumption that I was about to read a mystery novel, I might have liked the book better. Right at the start of the book, there was a missing of an important manuscript and I thought the sleuth work was about to begin. Soon enough there was an missing employee. Looked to me the plot was going somewhere. The dead body of the missing employee was found at 60% progress bar but the dead person had nothing to do with the book theft. Unfortunately, nothing much happened afterwards until the grand reveal of the culprit. Only by then it wasn't too difficult to know who was responsible for the missing book(s.) Like I have mentioned, "The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections" has a weak mystery plot, but the story sounded promising. If read it as a regular literary fiction, I might have enjoyed it a lot better.

Something else that weakened my enjoyment was the inclusion of many subplots that served no purposes to the story development (i.e. Lisel's personal relationship with her family, and her ex. as one of the examples.)

To do the book justice, however, there were plenty of interesting elements to make the reading experience fulfilling. To name a few, the admin and politics of running an important library, the LBGT and gender inequalities within the literary circle back in the older days, the mentioning of rare collectibles, and etc.

Overall, I truly enjoyed reading "The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections." The author did an amazing job and the content reflected her effort and time to put together a wonderful book about books.

I love books about books. The cover had me before I even got a chance to read the description.

Liesl gets pushed into the head position of the special collections department when her boss has a stroke. She gets stuck between what she feels needs to be done and the university's best interests. I appreciated that her concern had to do with the books themselves and not appearances. The author's description of the texts through Liesl's eyes had me wishing I could get my hands on them.

Throughout, Liesl interacts with other characters that just aren't that memorable. I caught myself thinking "who's this guy" a couple of times during the reading. Turns out that guy was her husband. Two of the other characters, with small adjustments to the overall story, could have been removed. Their purpose within the story just didn't have enough impact.

Overall, if someone asked me, "Hey should I read this?" I'm gonna say yea. Not much mystery, but worth it just for the rare book descriptions.

Working in an academic setting and loving books should have made me a big fan of this novel, yet it did not. I found the situation contrived and the characters lacking both authenticity and likability. The story starts out with an intriguing catalyst, a safe that cannot be opened which houses a valuable rare book. This falls to Liesl Weiss to unfurl. She is confronted with growing responsibility and a growing mystery surrounding the rare books in her care.

The book is interesting for those of us in the academic world. Despite the exaggeration and the mystery, many of the caricatures ring true.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC.

When her boss has a stroke, Liesl Weiss steps up to become interim director of the university’s library of rare and special books. She was happy being second in command, but now she has more responsibility and with that comes some headaches. When she discovers that the last major acquisition that the director made before his stroke is not in the safe.

Without a way to communicate with the man, she is at a loss for how to handle the situation. While she wants to bring in the police, the President and others do not want to alert their donors that books are missing. As Liesl struggles with the decision, there are lots of fingers being pointed and accusations being made. All she wants to do is recover the books and retire, but first she needs to resolve the issue and make the donors happy. Can she do it, or are the books gone for good, just waiting to come back on the dark market in a few years?

While I think the book was an overall good read, it dragged in many places. There were times that phrases were repeated more than once and it would make me stop to see why. Though it was good to see the protagonist change throughout the book, I just wish the author could have done that with a little less rambling.

Despite a deep seated love of books, I don’t usually find myself enjoying books centered around libraries or the books themselves. However, this book kept my interest throughout and had me guessing who the culprit was until the moment of unveiling. I usually can guess the ending, but I was pleasantly caught off guard and happily proved wrong about all my assumptions.

There is a deep sadness within all the main characters’ lives, but the unfulfilled longing that the reader feels for them allows an uncomfortable and cathartic relatability when all is said and done.

I would highly recommend this book to all who find themselves looking for a mystery, but also those looking for fictional insights to themselves.

Sometimes I think publishers are pandering to librarians, given the overflow of titles with bookshops, libraries, and librarians featured prominently, and I was prepared for The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections to be one of those slightly disappointing bait-and-switch experiences, but I was pleasantly and happily surprised by this delightful, witty mystery that gives an honest look at academia and academic librarians on the journey. Highly recommended for librarians who will get quite a few chuckles, and for muggles as well.

I must admit that I am a sucker for a book about books and this does not disappoint. Eva Jurczyk weaves together a wonderful tale in the present of a stroke victim currently in a coma, a near-retirement assistant called in from sabbatical to run things in his absence, a woman coping with depression, and a few missing rare manuscripts. In the past, we have an affair and a tale of how the department of rare books and special collections came to be. Liesl Weiss was on sabbatical when she is called back to work at the library when the director suffers a stroke that leave him comatose. Lisle soon quickly discovers that a recent acquisition is missing, followed by more missing rare books from the collection. As she tries to put the pieces together, Liesl unravels more mysteries than she expected. I found this to be a wonderfully crafter mystery with plenty of twists and a beautiful love letter to libraries, librarians, and books.

The story stars with Liesel, the assistant director of the department of rare books and special collections, being called back from her writing sabbatical when her boss has a stroke. The library has just acquired at half a million dollar book and her boss is the only person with the combination of the safe where it is kept. When the safe is finally found the book is nowhere to be found.
I like the general premise of this book, valuable books vanishing without a trace, but honestly Liesel was not a likable character to have to go through the story with. She seemed completely inept at the job she said she would do, regularly drank while working (she seemed like an alcoholic but that’s never addressed), and in general did not make a female librarian seem anywhere near as competent as her male coworkers. @ lot of things going on in this book are never really addressed or barely mentioned as the book wraps up.
Intriguing plot, but characters I didn’t really want to spend time with.