To be honest here.....on bag day, we don't spend a hell of a lot of time examining what we throw in the bag......something on the cover might catch our eye, or a snappy title, or an author we've enjoyed before.....or the plot synopsis might sound so beyond idiotic to make it worth a try, or at least worthy of hurling into the paper bag.
Genre? Never a consideration.....as we pointed out in the BQ bio, we're willing to read anything and everything, even it turns out so far out of our demographic, it might as well have dropped in from another planet.....
Which pretty much describes our reaction to this book when we plucked it out of the bag....romance-laden chick-lit about a recently unemployed British librarian. (The cover, a homey, warm 'n fuzzy illustration of a packed bookshelf, must have been the incentive that prompted us to toss it in our stash)....\
Our elfin-sized heroine, Nina, unable to secure another library gig, buys an enormous van, outfits it as a mobile bookstore and heads for the Scottish highlands, home of many lovably eccentric book-starved villagers as well as two potential swoon-worthy boyfriends for Nina...... a poetic, droopy eyed Latvian train engineer and the crusty, grumpy farmer who's leasing his barn as a converted home for our plucky bookseller.
It didn't take a bookshelf to fall on us to realize this book wasn't meant for the BQ.....which of course led us to give it a read anyway.....or maybe start a few pages just to see how far into it we could progress before groaning to ourselves....'no,no....maybe not....'
What took us by surprise and kept us reading.......author Jenny Colgan's sharp sense of humor.....some of the comedic byplay in the dialogue had us....dare we say....laughing out loud. We could easily picture this as a Scottish version of a typical romantic comedy directed by the late Gary Marshall. Add to that the author's and her cast of characters great love of books and the whole thing makes for an irresistible package.
The feisty, frothy humor kept our attention through most of the story.....until Colgan abandons the laughs in the final chapters.....concentrating mostly on what no doubt the book's targeted readers were anxiously longing for.......melodramatic complications and long awaited hot 'n heavy bouts of athletically satisfying sex between Nina and her designated True Love.....
But we even stayed around for the boilerplate romantic stuff, even though we longed for Colgan to throw in a few more zingers to make us smile.....(apparently, she's written a whole slew of these books that follow this storyline template with Kabuki Theater rigidity.....only the retail venue changes....from bookstores into bakeries and whatnot....)
Okay, we freely admit to enjoying it as an unexpected, deep-in-the-paper-bag guilty pleasure.....and for this super-cozy tale of a bookseller, we'll ring up 3 unashamed stars (***).....quite a change of pace from the last book we dug out of the paper bag, something about a giant slithering squid gobbling up people in the Bahamas.....no romance at all, not even for the squid.......
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