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I was hoping for something light, easy to read and with some likeable characters. The book certainly met the first two of those criteria, but I found the number of characters quite confusing, with none of them being all that appealing. The first few chapters introduce new people rapidly, most of them caricatured, and it took a bit of effort to keep going.
I’m glad I did, as the various subplots start to converge, as they all visit a newly-opened teashop in a square that’s being redeveloped. I’m not sure why it’s called a teashop as most of the visitors drink coffee and eat cake, but that doesn’t much matter. Lena is the proprietor of the teashop; she’s always rather over-cheerful and welcoming, kind to everyone. The shop doesn’t just sell drinks and cakes; there are a large number of literary items for sale - bags made out of books, keyrings in the shape of famous characters, and many other items which mostly sound rather kitsch, although the customers seem to like them.
The first person we meet in the book is Carla, mourning at her husband’s funeral which ends on a dramatic note. She has no idea what she will do in the future when she learns that most of what she thought about her life was wrong. Thankfully she has some good friends who take her under their wing.
The next person is Will, a young businessman who owned a roofing company that has gone bankrupt. His bank refuses any more credit, and he knows he’s going to lose everything. He’s married to a selfish, greedy person called Nicole who decides to return to her parents rather than live with someone she sees as a loser. I couldn’t begin to understand what Will saw in Nicole, or why he was still trying to appease her and promise her that things would get better when he knew that they would get a lot worse first.
Then there’s Molly, in her late 60s who lives next door to her twin sister Margaret. Margaret has been happily married for forty years, but Molly has had two shorter-term and not so successful relationships. She has a son from her first marriage, who’s quite a bully, married to a dreadful woman called Sherry who would like to see Molly go into a care home. Then one of her former ex-husbands turns up, out of the blue…
Perhaps the problem is that there are too many viewpoints for any of them to feel fully rounded and three dimensional. Or perhaps it’s that the ‘nice’ characters are pleasant and endowed with all the virtues, even if some of them have secrets that don’t emerge until later in the book. Yes, Will has been a bit too much of a risk-taker but all the problems or secrets of the other main characters are due to events in their past which they couldn’t have done anything about.
As for the ‘bad’ characters, they don’t seem to have any redeeming features at all. And there are rather a lot of them: Molly’s former husband, and her son and his wife; Carla’s deceased husband and his first wife; Will’s wife and her parents. In addition the owner of the land where Lena has her shop comes from a very unpleasant childhood with parents who didn’t care, and foster parents who treated him badly.
And there’s 14-year-old Ryan - who is, in my view, the most likeable character in the book. Ryan comes from a family of criminals; his mother left when he was a baby, his father has just moved out, two of his brothers are in jail, and the one remaining in the house is a violent bully. Somehow Ryan has managed to avoid being tainted by his family and has grown up loving books. I don’t know of many 14-year-old boys who could converse intelligently on a wide range of classic authors, but I found myself more in sympathy with Ryan than with any of the other characters.
It’s essentially a character-based book, and as such I found it quite readable. Most of the chapters are short, and once I’d got into it, it was easy enough to remember who was whom. There are several different subplots, but most involve the main characters trying to find a way forward, out of their dilemmas, with a purpose for the future. Naturally they all achieve this in a somewhat predictable way, and some of them pair off romantically in a way that’s also rather predictable. There are a couple of revelations towards the end of the book but while the characters are surprised, I could see them all coming. Perhaps I was supposed to.
It’s not the greatest of writing. The style of the book is informal, and a bit long-winded in places. Some of the conversations are little more than greetings and small talk; they don’t seem to go anywhere. And there were a lot of adverbs and lengthy sentences that could have been cut down. But apparently many readers like this style that breaks many of the guidelines for good writing, and it’s not a bad book. There’s almost no bad language, and no bedroom scenes, although there are references (non-explicit) to childhood abuse of different forms.
I don’t suppose I’ll read this again, and I’m not inclined to look for anything else by this author. But I’m glad I finally got around to reading ‘The Teashop on the Corner’. And if I do happen to see another of her books on a future church booksale, I might just pick it up. If you like lightweight women's fiction with somewhat stereotyped characters and a mostly happy ending, this could make good holiday reading.
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