I rarely pick up an ebook from the Amazon collection of First Reads and promptly pass on it once I get it. I don’t take just anything, I’m a bit picky in adding something to my TBR list, but a name like Alice Hoffman is a good selling point. Strong history, good writing, and it was just a short story called “The Bookstore Sisters”. It had elements of a backstory, something that went wrong between two sisters that inherited a bookstore, etc. Sounded interesting, perhaps.

So I gave it a go. It was a bit off-putting with some of the, well, “hatred” or aggression that seemed to permeate the first bit. Like characters who don’t just dislike each other, or that might be a bit dysfunctional, but more undercurrents that the people are just not very nice to begin with. It’s hard to put a finger on examples in the first pages. Maybe it is the constant whining from the sister who stayed, “Well, you did this and this and this and this and this and this,” aka emotional blackmail of “if you loved me, you’d do this.”. The sister who left should have told her to sod off.

But what turned me off was the 40% mark. The sister who stayed has a daughter who wrote asking for help, and when the prodigal sister returns, the niece is even at the ferry with a sign that says “Help” on it. Really? Makes no sense, honestly. And as the returning sister is about to get off, the niece is waving to her. Okay, I guess. But then here is how the niece greets her:

“It took you long enough,” Violet said. “You’re the last person off.”

“You don’t look anything like my mother.”

“You do,” Isabel said.

“I’m nothing like her,” Violet said. “But you wouldn’t know since you don’t know the first thing about me. I found your address on an old envelope in my mother’s night table drawer. I didn’t know if you’d really come, but now that you’re here, maybe you can help for once in your life. Just don’t expect me to like you.”

The bold is added by me. Right. So an 11yo needs help, writes to the aunt she doesn’t know, and greets her with the phrase “help for once in your life”. And the aunt goes “okey dokey”? Seriously?

First of all, the 11yo would NOT greet her like that after waving and playing with a dog, etc. Nor is any adult likely to take that “slap” from a kid. It’s rude and abusive, and I stopped reading immediately. I don’t care what happens in the rest of the story. If that is how you have people interact, every phrase some sort of emotional abuse, I’ll pass. In the instance, not only would I have ripped a strip off the kid verbally, I would have turned around, and left on the spot. If the main character is going to be a doormat, I don’t have much desire to read about them.

Is that overly harsh for a short story? Perhaps. But at least it was free. And 42000 other people reviewed it for a combined 4.1 review. Most of the reviews that are critical talk about the implausibility of it all, including the niece that I mentioned. Apparently, they all got even worse later in the story. Generally, the returning sister behaved with grace and accepted all slings and arrows to save the day. Yawn.