I have friends who only read romances, and that’s great for them. My grandmom used to get a shipment of Harlequin romances by mail every month, and she read them a lot more than she did her scriptures. I knew it was fun for her, and I respected that. But I’m not as big a fan.
I like a good romance, sure, but they need to be funny or surprising or even just fun. An exotic locale is always a plus, if it’s used well, and a great supporting cast can make or break an otherwise mediocre book.
Set in Paris, this novel has one of the most romantic locales in the world. The concept of a bookshop for broken-hearted folks is fresh and related directly to my interests in books and reading. The supporting cast at the bookshop is fun and sometimes funny. Going by my checklist, this should have been a fantastic read.
Yet, it wasn’t.
I finished this book with a strong feeling of Meh, and it took some thinking for me to figure out why.
The location was Paris, but I never felt like I was in Paris. It’s not enough to tell me you’re in Paris, I need to feel it. I need to see the sights, feel the air, smell the smells.
The chick-lit genius, Jenny Colgan, wrote a book called The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris, and when I read it, I was IN Paris. That book couldn’t have taken place anywhere else, while this Bookshop could have been plunked down in Duluth, and it would have made no difference to how the book felt.
The supporting cast was strong, but the time spent with them was rushed and felt too diffuse to ever develope them into anything that felt real.
Even the romance was rushed, and that’s the last thing the romance should be in a chick lit/romance book. Henri was fine, but we see very little of him outside the spurious conflicts at the beginning to put the characters at odds, and then the bigger conflict is summarized more than presented as a full moment in the book.
This is an instance where the book would have benefited by adding about 10-15% of time. Time for us to fall in love with the setting, the characters, and the romance. Rushing to the end just made me want to finish it and go read something better.
It was clean, though, so my Grandmom would have loved it.
3 maybe-its-just me stars
