A review by rebroxannape
How to Find Love in a Bookshop by Veronica Henry

3.0

It’s a question of whether you want to live, breathe, sleep, and eat books for the foreseeable future.” “It’s how I was brought up.” “Yes, but you won’t be able to float around plucking novels from the shelf and curling up in a corner.” Andrea laughed. “Every time I went in, your father had his nose in a book, away with the fairies. That’s not going to work. You’re running a business. And that means being businesslike.”

Yay! Andrea tells it like it is. Thank goodness, Emilia, who inherited the bookshop from her beloved father took her advice very seriously and understood she had to run the shop like a business that had to get out of debt and make a profit and not like it was a lifestyle.

While Emilia is attempting to keep her bookshop in business both because she loves it and as a tribute to her father, we meet 6 couples who find each other or re-find each other because of it. Hence the title. Emilia also has a romance of her own, and we learn about her father and her dead mother's story. The only one that really engaged me was the story of Alice, the sunny energetic daughter of the lord and lady of the local manor. She is soon to be married to the wrong man. Will she realize her mistake in time and recognize that her lowly estate gardener is her perfect match? Alice and Dillon's story had some real drama and suspense. And in a book full of sweetness and sweet romances, it was the most romantic, I thought. The other stories filled the pages nicely, but ultimately were a little tame. The complications were resolved pretty easily with a little gumption and communication.

This was a well-written book full of likable people that you want good things for. It was lovely. The happy endings were more than they probably could have imagined in their wildest dreams. In fact, it was a little too fairytale especially the book shop part. If a bookshop can be a Mary Sue, this was it. But you know what? Sometimes that's OK.