The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 368
Published by William Morrow on September 20th 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads
Nina Redmond is a librarian with a gift for finding the perfect book for her readers. But can she write her own happy-ever-after? In this valentine to readers, librarians, and book-lovers the world over, the New York Times-bestselling author of Little Beach Street Bakery returns with a funny, moving new novel for fans of Meg Donohue, Sophie Kinsella, and Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop.
“Losing myself in Jenny Colgan’s beautiful pages is the most delicious, comforting, satisfying treat I have had in ages.”—Jane Green, New York Times bestselling author of Summer Secrets
Nina Redmond is a literary matchmaker. Pairing a reader with that perfect book is her passion… and also her job. Or at least it was. Until yesterday, she was a librarian in the hectic city. But now the job she loved is no more.
Determined to make a new life for herself, Nina moves to a sleepy village many miles away. There she buys a van and transforms it into a bookmobile—a mobile bookshop that she drives from neighborhood to neighborhood, changing one life after another with the power of storytelling.
From helping her grumpy landlord deliver a lamb, to sharing picnics with a charming train conductor who serenades her with poetry, Nina discovers there’s plenty of adventure, magic, and soul in a place that’s beginning to feel like home… a place where she just might be able to write her own happy ending.
My Review:
The Bookshop on the Corner begins as every librarian’s nightmare, and transforms itself into many librarians’ dreams as Nina takes her life into her own two hands and goes from harried and laid off librarian in Birmingham to contented and fulfilled bookseller in the Scottish Highlands.
It’s a lovely journey. The bookshop on wheels that Nina puts her heart into has the best bookstore name ever, “ The Little Shop of Happy-Ever-After.” If only that were such an easy thing to buy. Or sell. But Nina Redmond certainly finds one of her own, and brings that possibility, or at least the escape into a vicarious one, to lots of little towns and villages dotted through the land she comes to call home.
The story does not have an auspicious start, at least not for our heroine. As is unfortunately happening in real life in the U.K. Nina’s little branch library in bustling Birmingham is closed due to budget cuts. A very, very tiny number of the staff will be relocated to the headquarters library, to jobs with less pay and nearly no contact with the books that they all love. The powers-that-be have drunk the “new media age” kool aid, and are more interested in people who don’t read than people who do.
Anyone who has worked in a library in the past couple of decades has probably run into all too many avatars of this breed. I love my technology, and I do most of my personal reading on an iPad, but if there are no books, there is nothing to put on said iPad. Reading is reading. I digress.
Nina, who has been living a safe, sheltered and mostly comfortable life by hiding within the pages of whatever book she is reading at the moment is both crushed and energized at the same terrifying moment. She has no job, but she has a scary dream of opening a traveling bookshop, not dissimilar to a bookmobile, but with prices on the books instead of date due slips.
In the face of impending economic doom, and the tons of books she has accumulated in the house she shares starting to crack the ceilings and the stairs, Nina hesitantly hatches a crazy plan. She goes off to the Highlands to buy a white elephant of a van. When she discovers that she can’t get any of the dozens of permits she needs to operate her bookshop in overcrowded Birmingham, she takes her dream to where the van is blocking most of a street. In the Highlands village of Kirrinfief.
The story is Nina’s journey. She has to step way, way outside her comfort zone to find the place that speaks to her heart. And because she opens herself up to the love of the people who are drawn to this place, love finds her as well. As everyone around her rediscovers the love of a good book, Nina is finally able to stretch herself to discover that a good book is no substitute for a real life – even with a bit of heartbreak along the way.
Escape Rating B+: Although I very definitely enjoyed this story, it also felt like it had a bit of a fantasy element. Sadly the demise of Nina’s little branch library and the direction that things took in the library reorganization felt much, much too real. The situations are somewhat different between the US and U.K., but not that different. Unfortunately. The struggles experienced by Nina and her former colleagues were all too real.
On that other hand, the situation that Nina drives herself into in Kirrinfief felt a bit like a trip to Brigadoon. Opening any kind of bookshop is all too frequently a fast track to going broke. Like any small business, it’s much easier to start one than make one successful. Her approach is just different enough to make this barely possible, and she has no competition whatsoever. None of these little towns seem to be big enough to support their own little bookshop, and the libraries have all closed. Internet coverage seems to be so spotty that the instant access to Amazon or Waterstone’s just doesn’t exist. Nina seems to have sidled into her niche at just the right time.
Admittedly, in real life some of Nina’s book acquisition methods would give all of us a bit of pause. It feels like she skirts the edge of legality just a bit in the beginning. Maybe more than a bit.
She has the gift that we all wish we had, matching a reader with just the right book for them at just the right time. That gift is also a touch of magic.
But what Nina seems to be doing is bringing people together in their mutual love of books. And by doing so she makes a place in the community that is hers alone. In an area where there seem to be 5 (or more) single men for every woman, there’s also a damn good chance that Nina will find a romance for herself that is not between the pages of a book.
That she stumbles rather dramatically at first makes her a bit more human. So many of the business aspects of this story feel a bit too easy even for fiction, but the way that she initially messes up her love life make her more real and more sympathetic. She’s more human for screwing up.
That the romance she finds is the icing on a cake she has already baked for herself, and not the actual cake, gives this story its heart.
~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~
The publisher is giving away 3 print copies of The Bookshop on the Corner to lucky entrants on this tour:
