A review by bgg616
The Library at the Edge of the World by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

2.0

I got this book thinking it was non-fiction. I was wrong, sigh. And on top of that it is romance fiction. Hanna Casey has come back home from London after a divorce. The story purports to be about a mobile library (bookmobile) wandering rural Ireland. In reality, this story hardly figures into the plot. Hanna divorced a very rich man and didn't want any settlement. They have a teenage daughter and she doesn't have a job. This is the first clue that this woman is hopeless. There is a ridiculous episode where she flies to London and gets a hotel room (where does she get the money?) and has her husband meet her in her room so she can ask him again for money. Of course he gets the wrong idea of what she's up to and she gets angry and so on. A wasted trip and a stupid scene which kind of sums up some of the problems I had with the book.
Her personality comes across much of the time as somewhat snarky. In Maeve Binchy fashion (I really liked MB despite her over the top optimistic stories) people collect around Hanna to make her life easier. But she's not nice to them. She decides to renovate a wreck of a family cottage even though she has no job or money. Somehow the bank lends her money and a local builder who she distrusts helps her by finding priceless fixtures and furniture for next to nothing (really?) which she doesn't appreciate. Towards the end of this unsatisfactory story, she meets a possible love interest. This book is labeled the first in a series - oh Lord, protect and save us from more schmaltz.
In the afterward, the author reveals this is a fictional place and even the details of life in rural Ireland don't quite resemble reality. Jeezzzzz.