I liked this story. Good emotional content as I've come to expect from Mr. Resnick. I liked the budding romance between these two socially-awkward individuals and the analogy of escapism through books worked very well. From the title I was kind of dreading this, but the story itself overcame that quite nicely.
I was a little bit surprised that the raccoon had any interesting in tearing the place apart other than finding food, so that seemed more like a plot element than an actual possibility. But I don't know much about raccoons so I could be wrong on that.