
Author: Katarina Bivald
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 3.5/5
# pages: 395
Date read: December, 2017
Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist - even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory.
All she wants is to share the books she loves with the citizens of Broken Wheel and to convince them that reading is one of the great joys of life. But she makes some unconventional choices that could force a lot of secrets into the open and change things for everyone in town.
Very, very, VERY slow to start. Setting the stage took forever, and while I never actually got bored with the book, it was just much too slow moving, and after about 140 pages, I set down the book and didn't touch it at all for 3 months.
Finally I got stubborn though. I knew that if I gave up on it completely I'd probably never pick it up again, and it came too highly recommended for me to do that. So I picked it back up and told myself I'd give it another 50 pages. If it still hadn't caught my attention by then, it obviously wasn't for me.
Well, the book must have sensed my threat, because it took no more than a few pages for it to charm me in a way that none of the previous 14o pages had. Sara finally got serious about the bookshop, and a few instances of her matching books to their readers and have those readers fall in love with said books (which I all knew and had read myself) was enough for me to get thoroughly hooked, and I finished the rest of the book in just a few days.
It's a very cozy book, and I've always loved books about books, so parts of it had me grinning from ear to ear. But the slow start combined with the abrupt (and somewhat unrealistic) ending means that it can't make its way to my favourites.