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.
~ Praise for Jenny Colgan and The Bookshop On The Corner ~
“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
“With a keen eye for the cinematic, Colgan (Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery, 2016, etc.) is a deft mistress of romantic comedy; Nina's story is laced with clever dialogue and scenes set like jewels, just begging to be filmed. A charming, bracingly fresh happily-ever-after tale…”
— Kirkus
“This is a lovely novel with amazing characters who are hooked on books… at least some of them. The plot is believable and is a joy to read. The main female character, Nina, is the librarian who always figures out the best choice for a patron without fail. Jenny Colgan thinks outside the box and creates a memorable book.”
— RT Book Reviews
“This charming tale celebrates the many ways books bring people together”
— Booklist
“This light, fresh romantic comedy is the perfect escape for bibliophiles. Enjoy it with a cup of tea on a crisp day.”
— Real Simple
“[A] love story about reading and the joys books can bring to people’s lives.”
— All About Romance
~ About the Author ~
Jenny Colgan
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.
~ 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.
~ My Review ~
Title: The Bookshop on the Corner: A Novel
Classification: Adult Fiction
Genre: Realistic Fiction/Chick Lit
Format: Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (September 20, 2016)
ISBN-10: 0062467255
ISBN-13: 978-0062467256
Author's website: http://www.jennycolgan.com/
Notes: I received an eARC loan from the publisher for an honest review. Any errors with the quotes are most likely mine as they were hand typed.
Once upon a time a librarian lost her job due to budget cuts and library closings. With only one spot available to many displaced workers, her hopes of being the one to land the position are bleak. While attending a confidence building workshop hosted by her employer before the final choice is made, she is asked a thought provoking question that will change her life....
"What do you really want to do?"(...)
Very reluctantly, Nina edged toward the table.
"I haven't really thought about it."
"Course you have," said Mungo. "Everybody has."
"Well, it'll sound silly. Especially these days."
"Nothing sounds silly in here. We've all been falling backward off tables."
Nina climbed up onto the table. The rest of the group looked at her expectantly. Her throat went dry and her mind went blank.
"Well," she said, feeling herself color in that awful way. She swallowed painfully. "Well...I mean. Well. I always ...I always dreamed that one day I might have my own bookshop. Just a very little one."
Sometimes all you need to make your dreams come true is to close your eyes and take a leap of faith...
'
If you thought of all the tiny things that divert your path one way or another, some good, some bad, you'd never do anything ever again.
And some people don't . Some people go through life not really deciding to do much, not wanting to, always too fearful of the consequences to try something new, Of course, that in itself is also a decision. You'll get somewhere whether you put any effort into it or not. But doing something new is so hard. '
This book brought to mind two other books I've read,
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin and
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. It's not so much that they resemble this story, but rather it's the feeling you experience after reading them. Like Harold Fry, Nina is at a crossroads in her life and does something drastic that seems a bit crazy. In Nina's case an impulsive decision makes her life go in an unexpected new direction. Shortly after she purchases a van with her savings for the purpose of creating a mobile bookstore, the whole idea seems like a big mistake. She runs into one road block after another as she finds out she needs permits and permissions that don't seem to be forthcoming. Like A. J. Fikry, her love of books (of which many reading recommendations are given throughout) and the sharing of that love with others gives her life new meaning and purpose. I'd go into more details, but I'm trying to avoid spoilers.
Some of my favorite quotes:
- "But when you read a book, you feel like you're in it." (...) "Like actually being there. You plug straight into the writer's brain. It's just you and them. You experience what they experience."
- "But for Nina, whenever reality, or the grimmer side of reality, threatened to invade, she always turned to a book. Books had been her solace when she was sad, her friends when she was lonely. They had mended her heart when it was broken, and encouraged her to hope when she was down."
- "There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew - apart from, sometimes, music--to breach the barrier, to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduit between the two worlds."
Overall, I gave this one
4 1/2 out of 5 roses. A charming tale that spoke to the inner book lover in me It inspires you to be true to yourself, face your fears, take a chance on your dreams, and just go for it. I enjoyed all the bookish quotes and book recommendations. It's a must read for the avid book lover. There is also the start of a romance, but it is not the primary focus of the book, therefore, I'm foregoing my romance rating. I'll definitely be recommending this one to my friends. It left me feeling warm and fuzzy, and like all was right with the world.
