I was walking around the library, looking for something to read over the long weekend, and I saw this cute book. It had a cheery, bright colored cover and a cute title. What could go wrong?
Seriously, I was almost a third of the way through this, thinking to myself that although it was a quick, easy read, I really wasn’t enjoying it, and it was driving me crazy that it reminded me of something. I finally realized that it was by the same author as last year’s Dear Mr. Knightley, a book that I had high hopes for, but that failed me in the end.
This book gives me similar feels.
Lucy is a 20-something who lives in Chicago, and works in a super-popular antique /interior design shop. She is in charge of all of the rare books in the store, and everything that comes out of her mouth is book-related. She speaks in book quotes and compares everything to things that happened in books written hundreds of years ago. To me, this doesn’t seem realistic or healthy. But I went with it.
Lucy has a meet cute with James, who is shopping for his grandmother. They fall in love, talk about books, and then suddenly break up with James finds out that Lucy has a kind of awful and unforgivable secret.
But James’ grandmother takes a liking to Lucy, and brings her along on a shopping trip to London and the British countryside. Weird and contrived, I know. But still, I went with it.
And in the end, all is forgiven, and everyone has learned an important life lesson about themselves and their loved ones because LITERATURE. And this is where I couldn’t take it anymore.
Lucy was an abhorrent character. There was literally nothing about her that made me like her. She was manipulative and shady and I never once felt bad for her that she was dumped by James. I did feel bad that she had been abandoned by her con-man father, but it seemed like her mother was a strong woman who did her best by Lucy. And Lucy didn’t seem to appreciate that one bit.
What I did love about this book is all of the tidbits of information I learned about literary England. As Lucy toured Bloomsbury and Westminster Abbey in London, the moved north to the Brontes’ home up in Haworth, and finishing up in Bowness on Windermere, I googled along every step of the way. I learned about the Bronte family, Beatrix Potter, T.S. Eliot, and C.S. Lewis. And I’m glad that I did, as some of the stories were fascinating, and the scenery was beautiful.
Katherine Reay has a third book — once again about young women obsessed with classic literature, but this time with CANCER. I think I’ll skip it.
You can read the rest of my reviews on my blog.
Does the heroine of this book also have a whole load of unresolved issues and trauma related to her growing up in foster care? Because that’s really the only reason why I found it an acceptable and understanding character trait that whatsherface from Dear Mr. Knightley spoke entirely in book quotations and kept hiding herself in books. Even then, I thought it took her WAY too long to develop and grow out of such a dysfunctional habit over the course of the book. It sounds like Katherine Reay thinks that’s something that’s way more endearing than it actually is.
Her unresolved issues in this case are due to her grifter father abandoning her at a young age. He sends her a book — no note, no birthday card — each year on her birthday. So I get the book obsession. But not the quotes obsession.
Lucy never grows out of this habit and everyone around her can keep up and quote right along with her. It’s so odd. If I went to a shop and started quoting Jane Eyre, I wouldn’t be disappointed if nobody picked up on it and then started dropping their own quotes. Life doesn’t work that way.
I adore books and reading and heaven knows I read more than the average person or most of my friends. But only incredibly socially maladjusted freaks actually go through life conversing entirely in book (or film or theatre) quotes and relate all their experiences to books they’ve read. That is NOT a healthy or charming thing to do, it’s frankly quite worrying. I found it an interesting coping mechanism for the first half of Dear Mr. Knightley, but the fact that the author decided that this was something she wanted to repeat in this book is not a promising sign. Will probably avoid her books in future
Sounds like she’s one of those authors who keeps beating the same dead horse over and over again because it sort of worked the first time.