Plot or Premise

A bookstore owner can sense the emotions of previous owners of books.

What I Liked

The first 75% of the book is what garners the five-star review. It is lush with the main character, Ashlyn Greer, finding an old custom-bound book and feeling the emotion in it, the story of a love affair gone wrong. Another shop owner had shown it to her with a bunch of other stuff that came in, and she’s mesmerized by the book. A mystery surrounds where it came from, who wrote it, etc., as it is clearly not a commercial book. She manages to track down the person who donated the book, as well as a companion book, giving her two of them now — a he-said, she-said version of the love affair, with her feeling both sets of emotions as honest, true, and righteous in the break-up. She must know what happened, and to understand the true story. A romance blossoms with the donor, the son of a man who had been involved tangentially in both versions of the story and somehow ended up with the books. It’s a very Great Gatsby-like storyline, or for the more movie-minded, Titanic-esque for both timing and content. I got the book through Amazon First Reads, and it was well worth the offer.

What I Didn’t Like

I have to give a SPOILER ALERT. I debated back and forth if it was a five-star or only four-star book. Up until a certain point (75%), the story is awesome. But in the last quarter of the book, the spoiler is that the main characters to that point take an almost backseat to the climax, while it focuses on the characters from the books. While the “mystery” was front and centre, so was the “detective”. It’s almost like a Sherlock Holmes story where the client would solve everything and Sherlock wouldn’t really be around. In the end, the strong beginning and my emotional reaction to the storyline was too strong to detract. I am less enamoured with the ending, but the beginning is amazing.

The Bottom Line

Come for the tragedy, stay for the romance