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.
