The problem with creating an alternate universe

I think I've figured out why I find novels like Kate Quinn's The Astral Library unsatisfying.

It's Quinn's 18th published book so she knows what she's doing. The protagonist, Alexandra "Alix" Watson, a single, 26-year-old, who is living on the edge of economic disaster, is feisty and sympathetic. Contemporary Boston is recognizable. Secondary characters are well sketched. And The Astral Library asks an good question: Have you every wished you could live inside a book?

The novel starts with Alix's really terrible horrible bad day. She loses her fast food clerk job. He roommates are  evicting her for not paying her share of the rent  Someone has stolen her identity so the bank has frozen her credit card and bank card. Her one friend Beau Sato-Jones cannot help; he's working day and night on a gown that will save his dressmaking-costume business. At the end of her tether Alix seeks peace and quiet in the magnificent reading room of the Boston Public Library.

Alix has a scuffle with a security guard and in escaping tries a small side reading room door and finds herself in an even larger, infinitely larger, reading room—the Astral Library. 

It has some unusual features. The Library itself has to invite you in, but once you have a library card you can return easily. Its shelves hold every book ever produced anywhere in history. It is accessible from any library on the planet. The books have a kind of life; they flutter their pages when worried. Dead patrons may exist as spirits; dead Dennis is still reading his way through War and Peace. While time advances in the Library, it stops in the real world. In other words, Alix may spend a day in the library but when she returns to the BPL only a moment has passed. 

The Librarian, an ageless woman who can turn into a dragon, welcomes Alix and introduces her to the Library's idiosyncrasies. Alix, like the thousands of patrons before her, can disappear into a favorite book and live safely as a minor character. As a foster child with an absent mother no one will miss her.

Complications ensue. Which brings me to my dissatisfaction. I am willing to suspend disbelief long enough to accept a magical library, but I don't care what happens to Alix. I am more interested in how the author was going to address the problems she'd raised than in any of the characters and their concerns.

That Quinn includes a full-throated cry for adequately funded libraries that are free to all and free from censorship is admirable. Unfortunately, they need more than magic and an ageless dragon.