This is embarrassing. I am trying to remember a book that I read, and very much enjoyed, some years ago (I have no sense of time passing since the Teen FanPerson stopped changing so dramatically from year to year). I own the thing in e-book format. But I cannot remember the title or author.

Edit: It's The Library at Mount Char. I recommend it.



What I remember, in no particular order, is:

• A mysterious man takes in all the children of the neighborhood after all the adults are slaughtered, I think at a barbecue, by some mysterious force.
• This man is the keeper of some sort of ancient library. Each of the children is given a section of the library or a type of book to memorize, learn from, etc. They have corresponding abilities when they are adults.
• I think he confers a sort of immortality on the children, or enough of it that he is able to torture one by shutting him in a brazen bull for some ungodly period of time.
• In the main chronology, one of the children, now grown, a woman, is coming back to the neighborhood to take the mysterious man down.
• The man has maintained the illusion that the families in the neighborhood are still alive. I think the neighborhood is in a kind of magical field.
• The kid who was shut in the brazen bull, also now grown, is around, is unsurprisingly psycho, and is either working with the woman or is a threat to her or both.
• I think, in the end, the woman "triumphs"; the old man had been preparing her to take over the library.

Any bells?