What better way to get over a humiliating divorce than to inherit a house in a remote part of Scotland that is replete with antiquarian books? While Thea Mottram bemoans her all-too-cliched fate (husband fell in love with her good friend), she does a nice job swimming to the surface when she checks out the inheritance from a great-uncle she had only met four times previously (he liked her because she preferred reading to talking — our kind of girl!). While intending to stay just long enough to decide what to do with the house, she ends up working at the local bookstore owned by the curmudgeonly (but naturally also quite hunky) man of aristocratic origins, Edward Maltravers.
A thoroughly enjoyable read. While the bones are pure “women’s fiction,” the frills include Scotland, a bookstore selling both new and antiquarian books, and a few twists on the standard chick-lit plot. Good, humorous, writing and a strong, though self-deprecating, heroine that I would be happy to call a friend. My only complaint is that there wasn’t really enough discussion about the cool books! Her contributions to the book talk were denigrations of various classics with toss-off comments about how she doesn’t really care for it for some (to me stupid) reason.
A happy book and I learned a new (to me) phrase: Fourth Wave Feminism — a phase of feminism that began around 2012 and is characterized by a focus on the empowerment of women and the use of internet tools, and is centered on intersectionality. Who knew?
Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on May 4th, 2021.
Books to look forward to ... 