Yes, it is a romance novel, an adult one in places. The village embraces her and she finds she cares for them more than she would have thought–a teen girl Ainslee and her brother Ben, who are facing some trouble at home, a shopkeeper who has faced too many disappointments, and even the grumpy farmer, who she assists in delivering twin lambs that only she, with her small hands, could untangle inside the ewe. There is one delightful scene where she looks around the village, and sees people reading everywhere.
Some admit that when the libraries closed and no local stores were available, they just stopped reading. The bookshop is a huge success and villagers who haven’t read a book in years are matched up with books they love. Surinder comes up and paints the name she chooses for her little bookshop, The Bookshop of Happy-Ever-After on her van while she fits out the inside. She finds a beautiful converted barn to rent from a grumpy, divorcing sheep farmer, Lennox. With the help of the train engineer, a Latvian emigre by the name of Marek, boxes and boxes of books are transported from Birmingham to a train crossing near her home at Kirrinfief. At last her book-beleaguered roommate Surinder will get her and her books out of the apartment. They hope she will bring her little bookshop to their town, and after being turned down for vending and parking permits in Birmingham, and a near-disaster encounter with a train, she decides to stay. She finds the van–in rural Scotland–and finally, with the help of villagers, persuades the owner to sell it to her. The dream lingers and takes the shape of a mobile bookshop in a van. And she finally admits that it is to own her own bookshop, maybe a tiny one, where she can help match up people with books they will love.
In an outplacement workshop exercise, complete with all the cliche’s of modern corporate life, she is invited to share her own dream job. The story is that Nina Redmond, a librarian in Birmingham, is about to lose her job in a library consolidation.
It was a nice break from some other heavier reads, and explored some themes I found interesting.
What is curious-er is that I actually liked it, for the most part. I’m a sucker for books on books and so didn’t notice that this is categorized as women’s fiction, and romance, two categories I tend not to read. Summary: Nina Redmond loses her librarian job, pursues a dream of a mobile bookshop, ending up in the Scottish Highlands, bringing joy to a cluster of small towns in her Little Shop of Happy-Ever-After, while longing for her own happy-ever-after. The Bookshop on the Corner, Jenny Colgan.
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