Book Review: Bookish People by Susan Coll

My Rating:

⭐⭐⭐

Fifty-four-year-old Sophie Bernstein runs an independent bookstore in the Washington DC area. Snapshot of her current situation-Jamal, her store manager is off to law school, her events coordinator /aspiring writer Clemi just booked a controversial poet who she suspects is her biological father to speak at the store, recently fired employee Florence who fancied herself a soothsayer uttered a dire prophecy in her ear, an interested party is contacting her to buy the bookshop, her store vacuum cleaner gave out (once again) and a customer’s dog scared another customer’s baby which leads to a potential lawsuit. Sophie is at her wit's end in juggling it all.

Recently widowed, she is still grieving her loss and her college graduate son Michael, shows no interest in the bookstore and aspires to be a yoga teacher. She has designed a small nook hidden behind the walls of the store where she would like to spend some alone time but hardly gets the chance, given the chaos that descends in her store every day. Unbeknownst to Sophie, Clemi and Noah, another employee who Clemi has a crush on, purchase a pet tortoise, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. who they end up keeping hidden in a closet in the store as neither of them can take it home which is the source for a mysterious odor that has the rest o the staff perplexed. As the story progresses, we get to see the daily workings inside Sophie's store, customer interactions, mishaps, scheduling issues, inventory issues with unread galleys piling up, authors and publishers and aspiring authors with whom Sophie interacts and as the day of the scheduled events approaches she also has to deal with the different protest groups who camp outside her store, protesting the poet who might have driven his wife to suicide and another author whose work has animal activists enraged- both of whom are scheduled to speak at the store. In a nutshell, Sophie has a lot on her plate and it is interesting to see how she manages it all.

While Bookish People by Susan Coll has potential and an interesting premise, the execution falls short. I enjoyed the end-of-the-day emails and the camaraderie among the characters. With genuine laugh-out-loud scenarios and a likable protagonist with an interesting cast of characters- the story has its moments! That is precisely the problem. It has its moments! If I look at this novel as a collection of vignettes instead of one story, this book would rate higher. However, in the process of bringing so many moments in the novel together, the writing becomes disjointed in some places and in others, a tad repetitive. There is a lack of cohesion among the different elements in the story- too many sub-plots and the convergence of all those subplots feels forced. I find it hard to resist stories set in bookstores or libraries and while this book had promise, I could not help but feel a tad disappointed. Overall, while parts of the narrative are entertaining, I did not find it to be an engaging read and had to struggle through it.

My favorite quote from the book:

“She sometimes thinks the world divides into two types of people, those who think books are for reading when there’s nothing else to do, and those who avoid other things to do in order to read books—and unsurprisingly she’s in the latter camp, but really, is that so awful?”

Many thanks to NetGalley and Harper Muse for a complimentary digital review copy of this book. The opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.