‘Love in a Bookshop’ isn’t novel in its attraction
Henry’s Valentine to book stores is packed with people
Meant to appeal to book lovers, Veronica Henry’s How to Find Love in a Bookshop (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 339 pp., eegE out of four) is a love letter to books and the shops that sell them. Unfortunately, while heartfelt, the novel’s love stories are spread a little thin, almost as though they were abridged.
Set in the idyllic English town of Peasebrook, nestled in the Cotswolds, the story opens with Emilia Nightingale sitting at her father’s deathbed. She has flown back to Britain from Hong Kong, where she has been living and working. While there, she promises her father she will keep his beloved book store open. The bookshop, Nightingale Books, is more than a business to Julius. It is also his home — he’s lived in a flat above the shop since shortly after Emilia’s birth.
When Emilia takes over the shop, she learns that while her father may have been skilled at finding just the right book for a customer, he was in no way an expert at business. Emilia is left with a shop running in the red, more customers perusing her books than purchasing and a land developer waiting to pounce.
Along the way, Emilia’s life intertwines with the lives and loves of several characters. There is Sarah Basildon, the lady of the stately Peasebrook Manor; Thomasina Matthews, a worldclass chef and culinary instructor who is anything but worldly when it comes to the opposite sex; Marlowe, a professional musician who played alongside Julius in the town’s string quartet and a potential love interest for Emilia; and Ian Mendip, a developer who has his own plans for Nightingale Books.
All four have a strong connec-
tion to both Julius and his store, though some are more intimately entwined than others. Each character’s story sparks interest, but their promising tales feel shortchanged by an abundance of add- ed characters with even more romantic trials and tribulations. There’s Dillon, a groundskeeper; Jackson, a single dad; June, a bookshop employee; Alice, the daughter of Sarah Basildon; and Bea, a young mother and city transplant.
The novel’s flow is steady and even, and its story lines, with ups and downs, all fall easily into place. And while that makes for neat endings, it does not always make for a gripping read. The drama of possibly losing the bookstore is anticlimactic, buried between myriad stories that spread many of the novel’s story lines a little thin.
But drama, or lack thereof, isn’t everything. For many readers, there really is something magical about bookstores — the smell, the atmosphere and of course, the books. And in the end, Henry’s novel reminds us of just that.