The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan

Jenny Colgan is one of my favorite authors.  When life is stressful, I know that her stories will cheer me up and take me to a quaint village somewhere in the UK where a woman faces a crisis and finds a path forward through hard work doing what she has always loved. In this case, doing what she loves involves books, which I always love reading about.  As February is the saddest month of the year, I picked this light read for the February selection of the FLICKS Book and Movie Club (aka Rogue).  We meet tomorrow night at my house – we’ll see what everyone thought of the book.

Nina Redmond loves books.  She has the perfect job as a librarian and loves to match books with the perfect readers.  Her community decides to cut libraries and librarians, and instead have everything electronic and geared toward young people, she finds herself out of a job and adrift.  What should she do with life?  Unable to afford a store, she gets the grand idea of starting a bookstore in something she can afford, a van, and driving it around to match the perfect books with the perfect people. She moves to a small village and drives around to people that are yearning for books, but live without a library or a bookstore.  She also learns that she may be open to love as well.

I enjoyed this book.  I loved how Nina was able to take the dive and move someplace new with a career that she loves. She doesn’t make tons of money, but she finds happiness helping other people while meeting new ones.  I also loved the setting of the small village in Scotland.  It was quaint and cute.  

I will admit though that while this was an enjoyable book, I still love the Little Beach Street Bakery and The Café by the Sea the best of her novels so far.  It may be that they are series, so I know the characters better.  I saw that this book will have a sequel this year.  I can’t wait!

I found a great book club discussion list of questions complete with recipes at this link:

https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Bookshop-on-the-Corner-by-Jenny-Colgan

I only wish I would have found it before I picked up ingredients for desserts for hosting my book club.

I loved the message for readers for readers where Colgan describes all her favorite places to read and I enjoyed the humor.  Ironically as this is my book club pick, she says, “If you’re reading this for book group, I can only apologize and assume it’s 2:15 A.M. the night before the evening.”

Favorite Quotes:

“Dogs are tremendously good at showing you you don’t have to check your phone every two seconds to have a happy life.”

“The problem with good things that happen is that very often they disguise themselves as awful things.”

“You know, women who find men who read really frightfully attractive.”

“Books were the best way Nina knew – apart from sometimes, music – to breach the barrier, to connect the internal universe to the external, the words acting merely as a conduit between two worlds.”

Overall, The Bookshop on the Corner is a love story about reading and fulfilling your dreams.  It’s a fun read.

Book Source:  A Gift from my Best Friend Jenn. Thank-you!