The Bookshop Below

by Georgia Summers

Synopsis:

If you want a story that will change your life, Chiron's bookshop is where you go. For those lucky enough to grace its doors, it's a glimpse into a world of deadly bargains and powerful, magical books.

For Cassandra Fairfax, it's a reminder of everything she lost, when Chiron kicked her out and all but shuttered the shop. Since then, she's used her skills in less . . . ethical ways, trading stolen books and magical readings to wealthy playboys looking for power money can't buy.

Then Chiron dies. And if Cassandra knows anything, it's this: the bookshop must always have an owner.

To restore the shop, she'll need the help of Lowell Sharpe, a rival bookseller who is everything Cassandra is not - and knows it, too.

But as she is plunged into a world of unscrupulous collectors, deadly ink magic and shady societies, a dark force threatens to unravel the bookshops entirely . . .

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

A certain amount of my reaction to Georgia Summers’ The Bookshop Below is due to really bad formatting on Kindle, which chopped off the ends of some words (I think) and made it difficult to see what’s meant to be part of the narration, where it’s including documents and people’s notes on the documents, the notes sent between different characters, etc. Some of that will presumably be better in the final version, and that would likely help the flow of the story.

I thought the magic system reminded me a lot of Ink Blood Sister Scribe, and it felt like it never got very clearly laid out and delimited. That’s probably in part a matter of taste: I mostly rolled with it, but I can see other readers finding it extremely annoying. I did enjoy the concept of magic as a river, and bookshops as a way that magic gets out into the world through books which are more than just text. Despite that, sometimes it felt less about loving books and more just about making tangible magic with them; I wish it’d hewed a bit closer to books as magical and wonderful objects in and of themselves.

(Though sometimes worship of the printed codex as magic in and of itself can be annoying and problematic, too…)

I thought Cassandra brought a lot of her problems on herself in a way that was annoying, but I still got into her relationship with Lowell and her friendship with Byron, and her messy love for the bookshop she inherits. It ended on a surprisingly ambivalent note that I found pleasing: not a straightforward happy-ever-after, but a complicated compromise, with some signs of hope.

Overall, I enjoyed it, while thinking that some stuff could probably have used pruning out and tightening up, while other things could’ve stood to be a bit more detailed. Not a perfect read, but entertaining.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)