The Bookshop on the Shore

The Bookshop on the Shore by Jenny Colgan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Single mother Zoe can barely make ends meet. She works hard at a daycare taking care of wealthy people's children but can't afford to send her own 4-year-old there. Her ex, Jaz, rarely helps out and is gone most of the time, trying to make it as a DJ. Her son, Hari, is mute, and no one can figure out why. The last straw comes when her landlord hikes the rent on her lousy, run-down apartment higher than she can afford. Relief comes in the form of a job offer from Scotland. Well, two, actually. Jaz has finally told his sister he has a son, and when Surinder discovers that Zoe loves to read, she connects Zoe with Nina, from The Bookshop on the Corner. Nina needs someone to run her book van while she's on maternity leave. That's job #1.

Job #2 is as a nanny on evenings and weekends for the 3 children of the local Laird, Ramsay. This job comes with room and board in the form of a tiny attic bedroom in a Scottish castle and toast. A lot of toast. The three children have gone through six nannies in the past few years, and they are not excited about a seventh. If Zoe weren't so broke and desperate, she'd be happy to leave, too, but Hari loves Scotland and latches immediately onto the youngest of the three kids, Patrick. Eventually, with no good options remaining, Zoe straightens her metaphorical spine and begins to make changes, discovering that the siblings and their neglectful father aren't so much feral as traumatized, and though the locals don't want to buy books until Nina returns and tells them what to choose, the tourists are delighted with all the Scottish and Loch Ness-related volumes Zoe can lay her hands on.

The second book in this series conveys a tone of palpable grief, struggle, and emotional heaviness that slowly begins to lift as the characters grow and learn from each other. There is a slow-burn romance between Zoe and Ramsay, but it's not the focus of the story. Much of the book deals with mental illnesses and the effects those illnesses have on the family members who love them. Though the story begins with a weighted-down feeling, it ends with hope and strong family bonds.

For readers' advisors: character and setting doorways. No violence or sexual content, though sex is implied or mentioned as having occurred in a couple of places. Some swearing is sprinkled throughout, plus a great deal in one scene with Ramsay's drunk and angry girlfriend. "Found family" is a strong theme.

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The Bookshop on the Corner

The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nina has always lived a quiet, bookish life in bustling Birmingham, England, so she's at a loss when the library where she works is closed in favor of a new "media center." Only a handful of employees are hired to work at the new, apparently book-less, center, and she isn't one of them. However, this turns out to be the best possible outcome for her, as it gives her the courage to do something crazy and live her dream of owning a small mobile bookshop. She finds the perfect van in a village in Scotland, where folks are hungry for books and haven't had a library in years. She finds a gorgeous renovated barn to live in, complete with a grumpy, taciturn, very attractive landlord going through a contentious divorce. Nina makes friends and influences people, changing the lives of some. The caterpillar blossoms into a butterfly over the course of a spring and summer in the highlands.

The tone and mood of this book are so lovely! And I highly recommend listening to it on audiobook because the narrator does such an absolutely fantastic job with the voices and accents. Especially the accents.

I do wonder what on earth is going on with the libraries in the UK, though. Are so many really shutting down and jettisoning their books? Do their "librarians," as Nina and her coworkers call themselves, not go to the same type of library school we do here in the US? I ask because Nina is excellent with readers' advisory skills but seems to utterly lack all the other training of a reference librarian--namely the drive to help people find information, particularly using computers. Modern libraries are about SO much more than "just" books! And our books are so well-used that it's rare we would discard anything that was in pristine condition like so many of the cast-offs Nina picks up from libraries during the course of the story.

For readers' advisors: character doorway is primary, setting secondary. A few swear words and some off-screen sex, but no violence (aside from a vindictive ex throwing a valuable book into a mud puddle because she's been told she can't have it). The author clearly loves Scotland and isn't fond of big cities (Birmingham in particular).

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