The Little Paris Bookshop

What I thought would be a story about a bookseller learning how to help himself heal from emotional trauma through his knowledge of literature turned into three guys on a boat talking about women in gender essentialist terms while mourning the loss of their manic pixie dream girls. A huge disappointment since the first quarter of the book was great, but once the characters left Paris the floating ‘book apothecary’ felt like an afterthought. Maybe something was lost in translation, but after the shift in tone the pieces never came back together for me.

Jean Perdu is a bookseller, owning a bookstore on a barge floating along the Seine. Often referred to as a ‘literary apothecary’, for Jean Perdu had a unique ability to sense to perfect book to soothe his customers’ troubled souls. The only person he could never cure was himself and for the past twenty-one years he has been nursing a broken heart.

If it was not for the fact that The Little Paris Bookshop was picked for my in real life book club, I may have never picked it up. To be fair, this novel was picked based on the idea of bibliotherapy, without anyone reading it first. I was interested to see if this book was going to be as generic as it sounded as it is a book in translation; translated from German by Simon Pare. I did have hopes that this might end up as enjoyable as The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry, but sadly I was disappointed.

I normally love books about books but from the very start I was bored with The Little Paris Bookshop. It did pick up briefly when there was talked about The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Franz Kafka but this only lasted a few pages. My thoughts on this novel ranged from boring, cliché, overly sweet before cycling back to boring. I struggled to find anything to hold me through this book, the characters were dull, and nothing about the writing impressed me.

I tend to stay away from light reads; I like to be challenged a little, and I like to experience something exciting and explore interesting themes. There is nothing wrong with a light read, and at times it is needed. However The Little Paris Bookshop was not worth completing and if it was not for book club, I would have abandoned it (I should have). This is meant to be a romance/chick-lit type book but I have read so many better novels in these genres, and these are not genres I normally read. I hate to be so negative towards a book, but the only thing positive I can find with this novel is that it mentions other books, like The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the works of Franz Kafka.

This review originally appeared on my blog; www.knowledgelost.org/book-reviews/genre/contemporary/the-little-paris-bookshop-by-nina-george/