Book Review: The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan

The Bookshop on the Corner

by Jenny Colgan

Our book club picked a theme for this month of “titles with a book store in them.” I did a search in our digital catalog and came up with this one. I didn’t know the author, but I am glad I do now.

The “Message to Readers” at the beginning had me in stitches. Colgan talks about all the different places she reads, one being with her e-reader in the bathtub.

“You may not have been blessed with a magnificent Scots-Italian Peter Capaldi nose like me, but with a bit of practice you should soon find it’s perfectly possible to keep one of your hands in the water and turn the pages at the same time.”

The main character, Nina, is a librarian who has lost her job to a restructuring, but she attends a workshop that asks the question, “What do you really want to do?”

Nina hadn’t admitted to anyone that what she really had always wanted to do was to open a little bookstore. In fact, she has been hoarding books in her Birmingham flat for years, and her roommate, Surinder, is very much afraid the floor joists are going to go one of these days.

“Yet much as she disputed the fact, it was time to admit that books were not real life. She’d managed to hold reality at bay for the best part of thirty years, but now it was approaching at an incredibly speedy rate, and she was absolutely going to have to do something – anything – about it.”

Reality is a big theme in this book. Nina, like many of us who spent a good part of our lives in books, is incredibly adept at creating her own reality. That can lead to problems, but sometimes it takes the dreamers to dream something big and make it possible. If we can’t imagine it, we can’t create it.

With that desire in her brain, Nina does a simple little search for a van that she could turn into a mobile bookshop. She finds the perfect one, but it’s all the way up in Scotland.

The whole thing snowballs and it seems like the Universe has heard her desire and approves. Everything moves her in that direction. She has a little help along the way, from a barkeep and his patrons who want a local bookshop to a lady who knows the perfect place for her to rent, to a train engineer who helps her when her truck stalls on a rail and is a hairsbreadth away from being creamed.

There are friendships, and romance, and even love in the end. The journey zooms along and I would have given this book something between a 4 and a 5 but for the about face one character does. I could buy it, if the author had described it better, shown us the outward signs that signaled the inner journey taking place in that short amount of time, but she rushed it, and it really hurt the story for me – so I would rate it 3.5.

Though some things are glossed over, it’s a great journey and there are some wonderful observations.

“A dead Web site was a sad thing, she thought. Full of hope when it had been set up, and now floating away down the Google drain, gently decaying.”

I’m currently reading her second novel and it is even better than the first. I think Colgan grew as an author and there is so much wonderful in The Bookshop on the Shore, that I can’t wait to get back to reading it tonight. You could read the second before the first, but I don’t regret reading the first and would still recommend it for a modern slice of life and journey of growth.