“The Lost Bookshop” by Evie Woods

Life is too short to read books you don’t love. But the problem is… how do you know if you’ll love a book before you read it?

Sam gave me a copy of The Lost Bookshop for my birthday. Amazon calls it "the perfect gift for book lovers," so of course I can understand why Sam selected it for me. He did sound a bit uncertain about it, pointing out that even just the (quite pretty and intriguing) cover looks like something formulaic that AI might create if you prompted it with all the tropes that book lovers love. Something created to appeal to the greatest number of people possible, even if this is likely to result in no intense personal connection for anyone. Something created with "sell more books" as the only focus. 

This book has so many elements I should have loved. It's set in Dublin, London and Paris: places that are both familiar and exciting, foreign without being exotic, recognizable but not mundane. It has love and lust without embarrassing sex scenes. It has a beautiful and magical bookshop (not to mention Shakespeare & Co!), and it's full of secrets and mysteries. And it has books, books, and more books! Even a hidden manuscript of a second novel by Emily Brontë!

But somehow this combination of all the ingredients for a perfect book lover's book did not cook up into the perfect book for this book lover. It was okay. I didn't hate it. I read it easily. But love it I did not. 

The Lost Bookshop is one of those dual-timeline books (another thing I tend to love!), telling the story of Opaline [Carlisle] Gray in the 1920s alongside the story of Henry and Martha in the present day, as they discover Opaline's old secrets--how she tried to live the life of a strong, independent woman but was foiled by the patriarchal oppression of her time. But I found the characters and their emotions unlikely and inconsistent, and their secrets were either insubstantial or inscrutable.

And there were errors I could not allow to slide:

• On page 25, Opaline introduces herself to Hassan as "Miss Carlisle" (as a proper lady should). Then on page 28, Hassan calls her "Mademoiselle Opaline." How did Hassan know her first name? In a  better book, that error would not have appeared. In a much better book, that detail would have been a plot point later. 
• On page 39, this sentence appears: "That's because words survived, somehow I would too." Surely either it should have read "That" instead of "That's", or that one sentence should have been two separate sentences.
• While I can accept that a grown adult may not know how to make a martini, I find it very difficult to believe that any 21st-century adult human would search "through the bottles for one called martini." 
• Princeton University is not in New York. Close! but no cigar. 
• On page 347 (and this one is really unforgivable): Opaline daydreams about being in Little Women with Jo Marsh. Marsh? Marsh?!? (Here you should imagine my shout echoing throughout the city and causing the pigeons to fly up in a panic.)

But the good news is that now I can move on to a new book, and it's sure to be one I like more!