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Sunday, December 15, 2019

The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

I picked up a free copy of The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom, the first in a series of mysteries with a librarian protagonist. And I couldn't finish it -- the petty humiliations the author heaped on the librarian became tiresome, and the dialogue was a slog to get through. So I switched to Amy Meyerson's The Bookshop of Yesterdays, which was much better!

Miranda Brooks inherits a bookshop when her uncle dies, and becomes obsessed with learning the truth behind his estrangement from her family. Despite the disapproval of her mother, the skepticism of the store's manager, and her neglected boyfriend on the other side of the country, she follows the literary clues he left her, a fun narrative device. Much of the mystery hinged on a couple of people not telling Miranda the truth, which initially I found annoying but made sense by the end. Refreshingly, none of the characters were perfect -- although genuinely good people, they all made mistakes and acted selfishly at times, as real people would. This added a sense of seriousness and complexity to the narrative, making it a deeper, more satisfying read. I look forward to Meyerson's next book.

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