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.