A review by liralen
The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson

3.0

Sliding Doors meets The Butterfly Effect, I suppose. It's the early 60s, and Kitty is living a good life in Denver: owning and operating a bookstore with her best friend, single and generally content, her parents living nearby. Then strange, vivid dreams begin to show her an alternate version of her life, one in which a difference some years ago led her to a different life: married, with children; a picture-perfect life with her picture-perfect family. But things are not all as they seem.

Spoiler

This takes on some topics not much discussed at the time: it transpires that one of those children has autism, which was even less well understood then than it is now. We see a pretty simplified version of that autism—and even less of how the world outside the family reacts to it—but it's a reminder of how many conditions have been blamed on poor mothering throughout the years. I'm curious about how the reading experience might have been different if Kitty had realised there were three children, not two, right away, and if she didn't view Michael as a stain on her dream life for so much of the book.

The end's a bit rose-coloured-glasses, of course, but I did like the many small references to 1960s events.