I’ve mostly enjoyed the books I’ve read by Veronica Henry, an author I discovered about three years ago. So I added a few interesting-sounding titles of hers to my wishlist. One particularly intriguing title is ‘How to find love in a book shop’ which I was given for Christmas… in 2020! I have so many books on my to-read shelf that I have only just read it.
It’s a pleasant story that takes place in a village where most people know each other. The main character is Emilia, whom we meet in chapter one waiting for her father to die. It’s not the most attractive start to a book, but it follows on from a prologue, set thirty years earlier, when Emilia was a baby and her father Julius a single father deciding to put in an offer on a very run-down bookshop, realising he has to find somewhere to settle with his small daughter.
There are a couple of other flashbacks early in the book, so we learn about Julius before he got married, and the reason why he is on his own. It’s all rather poignant, but doesn’t actually have much bearing on the main part of the story which features Emilia’s attempts to revive and run her father’s book shop after he dies.
I found the cast of characters quite confusing - for the first half of the book each chapter seems to introduce someone different, and while their names and professions are quite distinct, none of them was really three-dimensional enough for me to feel as if I knew them. They mostly have some kind of connection with the shop, and with Julius himself; he was evidently a very caring person who spent a lot of time with people, helping them to find suitable books. However he wasn’t a good businessman, and as Emilia discovers, the book has not been making a profit for some time. Indeed, quite the reverse.
We meet , for instance, a young woman who is a teacher but loves to cook and runs a little ‘a deux’ restaurant; then there's Sarah, the ‘lady of the manor’ whose daughter Alice is due to get married. Therre's a musician with a snooty girlfriend, and a rough kind of guy, estranged from his wife and worried that his son doesn’t really know him… and many more. I’ve already forgotten most of their names. Inevitably some romances happen - the title of the book makes that rather clear - but I’m not sure I cared sufficiently about any of them to mind much what happened.
Not that it’s a bad book - I did find some of the storylines intriguing, although the switching between different characters means that subplots are left hanging while someone else’s life is described. It’s a bit of a soap opera style, I suppose, although the writing is good, and I did appreciate the many low-key literary references. But the people are a tad too caricatured, and Alice too sweet and naive to be realistic. I did rather like Dillon, the gardener at the large manor house, and I quite liked June, a motherly kind of woman who loves to read and regularly helps at the shop, although her story, which isn’t really revealed until towards the end of the book, also feels a bit unrealistic.
Still, it made an enjoyable few days’ light reading - and if the endings are a little predictable, they are entirely satisfactory.
This book would make good holiday reading if you like light women’s fiction; there’s nothing steamy, only minimal bad language, and the characters are mostly likeable, even if not entirely three dimensional.
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