Scottish Bookshop #1
Heat Factor: It’s not a hot and heavy book, but there IS some slow burning tension.
Character Chemistry: UGH, call me a sucker but apparently my weakness is Very, Very, Grumpy Scottish Men and Beautiful Isolated Places
Plot: Nina is laid off from her job as a librarian and jumps headfirst into running a very small, very cute bookstore from a very large van in the northern Scottish countryside, where she ends up meeting a grumpy farmer going through a divorce.
Overall: It was adorable to the max and full of dry humor.
Okay, so just to get it out of the way, there’s no bookshop on any corner. I don’t know why they went with that name when there are SO many options for cute bookshop-on-wheels. (Naming things is so much my thing that if I get started on this that’ll be the whole review, but I think we can just agree there’s potential.)
However—if you like relatively closed-door (heavily mentioned, lots of tension, but no detail) romance, this one was a hit.
Nina basically spends one hour in “new employee training” for her own job after her library is closed and reopened as a…well, not a real library, before she realizes she wants to sell books. In a van. Just, really badly.
She finds one in a little Scottish town and ends up getting it, only to discover she can’t sell the books in the city where she lives. So she moves up to the Scottish town and into a little barn on a farm owned by a grumpy, grumpy man who is also incredibly dreamy, and in classic small-town form, Nina ends up being forever changed by the people there and in love with Lennox the farmer.
It’s likely bordering on women’s fiction, but I could see arguments on both sides of this. It does heavily revolve around Nina’s life and personal development, but Lennox is tied in very closely—and he undergoes no small change himself.
I loved the setting and the general feeling of space and connection. It was also a lovely way to remember how good it feels to READ. There’s this part where Nina remembers what it felt like to just sit and read a book as a child and not have anything else to do but just sit there and be in the story, and oof. It was a book for book people, and a love story for people who can’t stop reading love stories.
Looking for something similar?
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