Metaphorosis Reviews
Written on Aug 8, 2024
Summary
The lives of two present day people and a 1920s bookseller are intertwined through a bookstore in Dublin that's only there some of the time.
Review
I downloaded and read two ARCs at about the same time – this book and A Harvest of Hearts – and a very faint similarity of covers somehow made me consider them together. As it turns out, one had stronger writing, the other a stronger story. This is the one with the better prose.
The writing throughout The Lost Bookshop is smooth and assured. The plot is on the predictable side, but appealing. Unfortunately, while Woods’ prose is strong, the characters are less so. There are three principal actors – a woman in the 1920s, and a woman and man in the present day. While each have different backgrounds and motivations, I found their voices relatively indistinguishable. They appear in succeeding chapters throughout the book, and the chapters are short – too short, perhaps, to allow them to settle in, initially. Because we have so little time with each, and because they all sounded the same to me – in their approach and inner dialogue – I often found it hard to tell which chapter I was in – which decade and which gender.
The problem becomes more marked because the book leans a little more toward romance than fantasy, yet I tended to lose track of who was reluctantly falling in love with whom and why. The why is often thin in any case, and sometimes forced. The fact that the characters sometimes act inconsistently didn’t help.
While Woods has clearly done a fair amount of research into her true-to-history characters, there’s less attention to some of the practicalities. All three major characters seem to generate funds out of thin air; they’re often short on cash, but somehow the magic of economics allows starving runaways to pay rent, buy stock, and immediately make a profit.
The secondary characters are also on the thin side, and often fairly two-dimensional – especially the villains. I think the book would have been more effective and convincing had the bad guys had a little more depth.
One fairly central mystery is never really addressed at all; it’s set up, but then (as far as I could see) abandoned to simply exist unexplained as the book’s magic mechanism. It’s not a crisis, but I did find it disappointing that the story pointed us toward a revelation and wrapup and then failed to provide it.
There’s nothing wrong with this book – it’s a pleasant approach to a familiar but always appealing trope (special bookshops), the writing is good, and there are some intriguing and surprising elements to it. But I did feel that, story-wise, it didn’t deliver what I had hoped for.
I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.