The Bookshop On The Corner

by Jenny Colgan

[MurderByDeath]

Stupid pedantic complaint:  as it says on the back of the book, Nina opens a mobile bookshop.  So the title is driving me a little nuts.  It's not on the corner; it's a bookshop in a van.  It would, in fact, be hard for it to be on the corner without blocking a street.   Anyway, moving on, it's a pretty fantastic book.  About loving books.  Loving them so much you collect them all and bring them home until they start to exceed the limits of what your home's structure was engineered to put up with.  It's about friends, and small towns in the highlands of Scotland, and more books and eventually, there's a romance, but mostly it's about chucking everything and reinventing your life.  With books.   I've seen some comparisons to Sarah Addison Allen, and ... maybe I can see this, if you take away all the magical realism that's such a huge part of Allen's books.  The comparison that came to my mind while I was reading it was, truthfully, just as much of a stretch: Jennifer Crusie.  Colgan doesn't have that snarky overtone of humor, but the style of story - the slower buildup and pacing - is not dissimilar.  I don't read much in this genre so I don't have a lot of comparisons at hand.   There were a few areas where I felt like she skipped over pertinent details, and what happened to Alasdair?  He was an awfully significant cog in the machinery that got Nina her new life, and yet we never see him again - not even to say "thanks".  But I did love it, and I'll read it again someday.