The Broken Teaglass

August 17, 2009
In Arsenault's quirky, arresting debut, two young lexicographers find clues to an old murder case hidden in the files at their dictionary company. Billy, the narrator, is a “strapping” recent grad with a football player's physique, a penchant for philosophy and a painful chapter in his past that he hasn't quite closed. Mona is a girls' college grad with an ambivalent relationship to her stepfather's wealth and a habit of falling for older, wiser men. The two are drawn together by tantalizing clues left—they assume by a former employee—in the company's citation files. As Billy and Mona spend more and more time hunched over the mysterious “cits” from a book called The Broken Teaglass
, they realize the murder may involve colleagues and acquaintances who are still roaming around the office, and Billy struggles to overcome the challenges of entering the adult world and leaving his old life behind. The result is an absorbing, offbeat mystery–meets–coming-of-age novel that's as sweet as it is suspenseful.

July 1, 2009
College graduate Billy Webb takes a job at the Samuelson Company, a venerable dictionary publisher in out-of-the-way Claxton, Massachusetts. While he learns the ropes of research reading, defining, and answering the phone, wondering whetherhis hushed workplace is really the real world, he finds an unusual citation (for the word editrix)from The Broken Teaglass, by Dolores Beekmim. Though its not the only such excerpt in the files, no such novel has even been published. Stranger still, the story seems to be set at Samuelson. Working with his arch, cryptic colleague Mona Minot, Billy tries to find the rest of the citations, which seem to make reference to murder. This debut novel has a delightful premise, crisply drawn characters, and a subtle sense of humor. Word nerds, too, will enjoy the peeks at the procedure of making a dictionary. A few flaws keep the novel off the A-list: pacing, supporting characters that float at the margins, and a late revelation about Billy that doesnt resonate as much as it might. Nevertheless, The Broken Teaglassthe real one, by Emily Arsenaultis the very definition of a promising debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)