Author: Janis Wildy
The English Bookshop is a story of an American woman from Seattle who had a British father who left her and her mum when she was a little girl. Her mother remarried an American guy who became her dad. After her stepdad’s death, she left college and started to run his family business of selling high-quality mattresses in Seattle. The business is struggling, and her stepbrother and mother want to merge the business with a large American company. Lucy struggles and tries to save the business, including pouring her own money into the company. Then she gets a notification that her father has died in England, and she inherited property.
She travels to England and finds out about a bookshop and the estate she inherited from her father. She plans to sell it to save her stepdad’s business but finds out she is one of the three people who inherited the estate, there is also her father’s wife and his bookshop manager, Sam. Whilst trying to organise the estate and the sale, she meets people in the local village, Wakeby, and befriends some of them, learns about village history and resistance from the local population to prospective property development, and also learns the truth about her father and his relationship with her and her family in the US.
The English Bookshop is a story of friendship, community, finding your roots, and learning family history and it portrays landscapes, both in Seattle and in Wakeby beautifully. I was surprised by this level of detail because British authors normally focus more on characters and their stories rather than landscapes and community descriptions, but then I discovered the author of the book is an American, which explained the focus of the book because I already noticed that American authors tend to focus on descriptions of places and communities, and they do so beautifully. Janis Wildy is no exception to this observation, and her depictions of places are wonderful in both Seattle and Wakeby.
I also liked the way Wildy described England and the English, and I read she is an Anglophile, so it does not come as a surprise she portrayed England and the English in such a nice way. The thing that is missing in the book is a portrayal of class, which British authors usually do well. I could not figure out the class origin of characters in the village or her father’s either, and personal stories were somewhat missing. The way Lucy formed friendships with the local community also felt a bit too quick because whilst her arrival to the village was a chance encounter, which is how friendships in the UK get formed, it was also a necessity because her father died, and friendships felt formed too soon, which is not how it normally happens in the UK. But I appreciated the positivity about the UK, particularly the portrayal of kindness and generosity, which is indeed true. I also agree that British jams and marmalades are the best, and cakes are amazing but come on, with the fruit cake lol
Overall, I took The English Bookshop on Kindle Unlimited because I thought it would be another great book by a British author portraying people’s stories and communities, and I also like books about books, readers, and bookshops. I was surprised by an American perspective on England and communities, which differed from British authors but was portrayed nicely. One of the messages of the book is also that it is never too late to change things in our lives and that we have control over what we do and how we do it. I love that, and I loved this book.
Thank you for reading!