In "The Bookseller" by Cynthia Swanson, Katharyn "Kitty" Miller wakes up one day to find herself in a stranger's home. Suddenly she's somebody's wife and mother and has to adapt to a life completely foreign to her. At first she thinks it's only a weird dream, but soon she realizes that this is the life she leads now- by night. By day Katharyn Andersson is Kitty Miller again and everything is back to normal. When she finds out that the man she's married to in her dreams is a man that she met in real life eight years ago, she tries to investigate the situation.
Can't Go Wrong With A Good Memory Loss Novel- Or Can You?
If you've been reading my reviews for some time, you know that my absolute favorite novel is "Life as I Know It" by Melanie Rose. This work is a combination of Rose's novel and "Remember Me" by Sophie Kinsella. I picked this book specifically because I am a sucker for alternate timeline stories. I expected "The Bookseller" to be identical in storyline to Kinsella's work, but it is absolutely not. Swanson uses a similar main idea but puts her own spin on it, having the story take place in the 1960s. Well, nothing about this feels like the Sixties, if you ask me. With Kitty and her best friend Frieda we have two very independent and emancipated women having their own business. You'd think that in those times there would be people against that, two singles dangerously close to their forties running a book store. A book store that isn't even that successful, even. I didn't get the vibe, it doesn't give off the 60s vibe at all. The novel might as well could have taken place in the 2000s. In the back flap, Swanson says that she chose to set the novel in the 60s because nowadays her main character would have had way easier methods to figure out what's going on. Well, I don't really get it, whether you consult a phone book or google someone's name doesn't really make a difference to me.
Unfortunate Pacing
I'm quite upset that I couldn't really get into this novel. It's written very slowly and there are pages and pages of irrelevant filler material that don't do much for the reader. The novel is way too long, I would have cut a good 1/3 of it. You can clearly tell that this is a debut novel because everything about it just seems a little unplanned. There are no distinct fix points in the chapters that drive the story forward and it's very exhausting to have to wait chapter after chapter for something to happen that might explain what's going on to the reader. The plot is basically just random snippets from both her lives that give off tiny clues to the reader as to what could be happening. And that only every other chapter if you're lucky. I feel like it would have been way easier if she at least would have stuck with one timeline and not kept jumping backwards and foward with the happenings in the dreams. Sometimes days pass inbetween Kitty's dreams and it's just way easier to follow the storyline if there's continuity.
A Very Oblivious Protagonist
I couldn't identify with Kitty as a protagonist, because she is an extremely naive person. Finding out that the dreams you have are actually based on real-life places that you've never been to would freak any rational thinking human being out. And then finding out that a man that you've (almost) dated died only mere seconds after your last phone call? That would certainly freak everyone out! I found myself clutching my head several times during reading this because I couldn't understand Kitty's motives in general.
Usually, Whaf If novels are absolutely my thing, but "The Bookseller" definitely wasn't my cup of tea. There's no tension, there's no clear story lie and the characters are just so, so uninteresting that there was nothing that captivated me and made me really want to find out the ending.
Rating:
★½☆☆☆☆
Overall: Do I Recommend?
This book could have been so perfectly 60s, so perfectly chick-lit and so perfectly my cup of tea. But sadly, it isn't. I had a very hard time finishing this. The storyline is sloppy, the characters aren't interesting at all and the resolution isn't really surprising. There's a lot of other novels with similar storylines that are written way better.
