As soon as I read about Jenny Colgan's latest novel,
The Bookshop on the Corner, I knew I had to read it. It's a book about - and for - book lovers. How could I say no?
Here's the synopsis:
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.
What I absolutely loved about this book is that it's a story of following your dreams no matter how crazy they may seem. That's a scary and hard thing to do and I love that Nina did it. She fought against some things (not wanting to stay in the small town with the van at first) but gradually came to realize that things were unfolding in a way that made perfect sense for her new venture and her new life.
The romance in this novel is pretty predictable (at least it was for me) but that's ok. It wasn't really the point of Nina's story. I think everything that happens to her (no spoilers here, folks!) is needed to make her realize that she
is worthy of a great love and especially worthy of someone who treats her with respect.
The Bookshop on the Corner is funny with a healthy dash of silliness - in the best possible way. Nina gets herself into a few scrapes but she has so much heart. She's lovable, real, and so much fun to read. Plus, she's such a quiet, almost forgettable character at the beginning of the novel and it's so wonderful to see her changing into a strong woman.
Jenny Colgan is an author who has so many books on my TBR list and after reading
The Bookshop on the Corner I'm definitely going to make time to read from her
extensive backlist! I also wouldn't mind at all if Colgan decides to visit Nina and her friends again in another novel someday soon. I kind of miss them! PS Keep scrolling for an excerpt from this new book
and a giveaway! (The giveaway is US only as per the publisher...sorry!)
About the Author
Jenny Colgan is the New York Times bestselling
author of numerous novels, including Little Beach Street Bakery, Christmas at
Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop, and Christmas at the Cupcake Café, all
international bestsellers. Jenny is married with three children and lives in
London and Scotland.
Connect with Jenny Colgan
Excerpt from The Bookshop on the Corner:
The problem with good things that happen is
that very often they disguise themselves as awful things. It would be lovely, wouldn’t
it, whenever you’re going through something difficult, if someone could just
tap you on the shoulder and say, “Don’t worry, it’s completely worth it. It
seems like absolutely horrible crap now, but I promise it will all come good in
the end,” and you could say, “Thank you, Fairy Godmother.” You might also say,
“Will I also lose that seven pounds?” and they would say, “But of course, my
child!”
That
would be useful, but it isn’t how it is, which is why we sometimes plow on too
long with things that aren’t making us happy, or give up too quickly on
something that might yet work itself out, and it is often difficult to tell
precisely which is which.
A
life lived forward can be a really irritating thing. So Nina thought, at any
rate. Nina Redmond, twenty-nine, was telling herself not to cry in public. If
you have ever tried giving yourself a good talking-to, you’ll know it doesn’t
work terribly well. She was at work, for goodness’ sake. You weren’t meant to
cry at work.
She
wondered if anyone else ever did. Then she wondered if maybe everyone did, even
Cathy Neeson, with her stiff too-blond hair, and her thin mouth and her
spreadsheets, who was right at this moment standing in a corner, watching the room
with folded arms and a grim expression, after delivering to the small team Nina
was a member of a speech filled with jargon about how there were cutbacks all
over, and Birmingham couldn’t afford to maintain all its libraries, and how
austerity was something they just had to get used to.
Nina
reckoned probably not. Some people just didn’t have a tear in them.
(What
Nina didn’t know was that Cathy Neeson cried on the way to work, on the way
home from work—after eight o’clock most nights—every time she laid someone off,
every time she was asked to shave another few percent off an already skeleton budget,
every time she was ordered to produce some new quality relevant paperwork, and
every time her boss dumped a load of administrative work on her at four o’clock
on a Friday afternoon on his way to a skiing vacation, of which he took many.
Eventually
she ditched the entire thing and went and worked in a National Trust gift shop
for a fifth of the salary and half the hours and none of the tears. But this
story is not about Cathy Neeson.)
It
was just, Nina thought, trying to squash down the lump in her throat . . . it
was just that they had been such a little library.
Children’s
story time Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Early closing Wednesday afternoon. A
shabby old-fashioned building with tatty linoleum floors. A little musty
sometimes, it was true. The big dripping radiators could take a while to get
going of a morning and then would become instantly too warm, with a bit of a
fug, particularly off old Charlie Evans, who came in to keep warm and read the
Morning Star cover to cover, very slowly. She wondered where the Charlie
Evanses of the world would go now.
Cathy
Neeson had explained that they were going to compress the library services into
the center of town, where they would become a “hub,” with a “multimedia
experience zone” and a coffee shop and an “intersensory experience,” whatever that
was, even though town was at least two bus trips too far for most of their
elderly or strollered-up clientele.
Their
lovely, tatty, old pitched-roof premises were being sold off to become
executive apartments that would be well beyond the reach of a librarian’s
salary. And Nina Redmond, twenty-nine, bookworm, with her long tangle of auburn
hair, her pale skin with freckles dotted here and there, and a shyness that
made her blush—or want to burst into tears—at the most inopportune moments,
was, she got the feeling, going to be thrown out into the cold winds of a world
that was getting a lot of unemployed librarians on the market at the same time.
“So,”
Cathy Neeson had concluded, “you can pretty much get started on packing up the
‘books’ right away.”
She
said “books” like it was a word she found distasteful in her shiny new vision
of Mediatech Services. All those grubby, awkward books.
—
Nina dragged herself into the back room
with a heavy heart and a slight redness around her eyes. Fortunately, everyone
else looked more or less the same way. Old Rita O’Leary, who should probably
have retired about a decade ago but was so kind to their clientele that
everyone overlooked the fact that she couldn’t see the numbers on the Dewey
Decimal System anymore and filed more or less at random, had burst into floods,
and Nina had been able to cover up her own sadness comforting her.
“You
know who else did this?” hissed her colleague Griffin through his straggly
beard as she made her way through. Griffin was casting a wary look at Cathy
Neeson, still out in the main area as he spoke. “The Nazis. They packed up all
the books and threw them onto bonfires.”
“They’re
not throwing them onto bonfires!” said Nina. “They’re not actually Nazis.”
“That’s
what everyone thinks. Then before you know it, you’ve got Nazis.”
—
With breathtaking speed, there’d been a
sale, of sorts, with most of their clientele leafing through old familiar
favorites in the ten pence box and leaving the shinier, newer stock behind.
Now,
as the days went on, they were meant to be packing up the rest of the books to
ship them to the central library, but Griffin’s normally sullen face was
looking even darker than usual. He had a long, unpleasantly scrawny beard, and
a scornful attitude toward people who didn’t read the books he liked. As the
only books he liked were obscure 1950s out-of-print stories about frustrated
young men who drank too much in Fitzrovia, that gave him a lot of time to hone
his attitude. He was still talking about book burners.
“They
won’t get burned! They’ll go to the big place in town.”
Nina
couldn’t bring herself to even say Mediatech.
Griffin
snorted. “Have you seen the plans? Coffee, computers, DVDs, plants, admin
offices, and people doing cost–benefit analysis and harassing the
unemployed—sorry, running ‘mindfulness workshops.’ There isn’t room for a book
in the whole damn place.” He gestured at the dozens of boxes. “This will be landfill.
They’ll use it to make roads.”
“They
won’t!”
“They
will! That’s what they do with dead books, didn’t you know? Turn them into
underlay for roads. So great big cars can roll over the top of centuries of
thought and ideas and scholarship, metaphorically stamping a love of learning
into the dust with their stupid big tires and blustering Top Gear idiots
killing
the planet.”
“You’re
not in the best of moods this morning, are you, Griffin?”
“Could
you two hurry it along a bit over there?” said Cathy Neeson, bustling in,
sounding anxious. They only had the budget for the collection trucks for one
afternoon; if they didn’t manage to load everything up in time, she’d be in
serious trouble.
“Yes,
Commandant Über-Führer,” said Griffin under his breath as she bustled out
again, her blond bob still rigid. “God, that woman is so evil it’s
unbelievable.”
But
Nina wasn’t listening. She was looking instead in despair at the thousands of
volumes around her, so hopeful with their beautiful covers and optimistic
blurbs. To condemn any of them to waste disposal seemed heartbreaking: these
were books! To Nina it was like closing down an animal shelter. And there was no
way they were going to get it all done today, no matter what Cathy Neeson
thought.
Which was how, six hours later, when
Nina’s Mini Metro pulled up in front of the front door of her tiny shared
house, it was completely and utterly stuffed with volumes.
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*An eARC of this novel was provided by the publisher, HarperCollins, in exchange for a review for a blog tour. All opinions are honest and my own*
