Book Review: The Lonely Hearts Book Club by Lucy Gilmore
Twenty-seven-year-old Sloane Parker is a librarian at the Coeur d'Alene Public Library, a place she considers a haven and where she feels most at home. She is engaged to be married to a chiropractor and is more or less content with the way her life is going, unwilling to rock the boat though she does carry much sorrow in her heart over the loss of a loved one from her childhood. In the course of her work, she meets the curmudgeonly Arthur McLachlan, a regular patron at the library whose cantankerous demeanor has most of the staff running for cover when he makes his entrance. Sloane and Arthur engage in heated exchanges and trade insults regularly – a kind of ritual for them Sloane gets used to and enjoys. When Arthur suddenly stops showing up at the library, Sloane decides to go check on him and discovers him recuperating at home after a medical emergency. Her unauthorized home visit with Arthur earns her a reprimand at work, but Sloane does not stop going out of her way to check on Arthur. She meets Arthur’s neighbor, Maisey, and with Arthur, they eventually form a book club with a few more members slowly joining in. The book club is a safe space for these lonely strangers to be themselves, and share their stories and, in doing so, become friends who enable one another to reevaluate their lives and exact positive change.
“This world was a terrible place. It gave you people to love and then took them away before you stopped loving them. It made you mean and angry and cruel to those who needed you most. It ground you down until it was all you could do to get through the day. But most of all, it tried to convince you that you were alone in your suffering.”
The Lonely Hearts Book Club by Lucy Gilmore is an emotional story that is built around a beautiful premise. The narrative is shared from multiple perspectives and touches upon themes like grief, loss, aging, loneliness, friendship and kindness. I appreciated that the author injects just enough humor and lighthearted moments into the narrative so as not to make the story too overwhelming/depressing for the reader. A running theme in this novel is the power of books and reading in bringing people close together. I love stories that revolve around books and people who love books and I have always believed in how books and love for reading can bring people together, as it does for these characters. I did enjoy the literary references and the discussions on Remains of the Day, The Joy Luck Club and Anne of Green Gables. Having said that, I expected to like this book more than I actually did. Stories like these are almost always predictable but what makes them special is the journey to the end. While I liked the characters, especially Maisey, and I did feel for Sloane, I wasn’t quite invested in any of the other character’s stories, a few of which I felt were a tad contrived. Greg and his connection to Arthur was a nice touch to the story, but with so many characters and backstories, there was a lot of drama to unpack, the pace did drag in parts and I found it difficult to stay engaged in the narrative.
This was another immersion reading experience for me. I'm sorry to say that I didn't really enjoy the audio narration. There were quite a few characters, and the narrator, Angie Kane, voiced two of them well, the others not so much. A full-cast narration would have been better suited for this story. Even a flat narration would have been okay.
Overall, while I did like this story, I wasn’t quite taken with it as much as other readers.
“Life stories were written in ink, not pencil. Once they were down, the only thing you could do was turn the page.”
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