Book Review: The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend.

2 stars (I liked it) for The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald.

Publication date: June 18th

Warning: once you let books into your life, the most unexpected things can happen…
This is a book about books. All sorts of books, from Little Women and Harry Potter to Jodi Picoult and Jane Austen, from to Stieg Larsson to Joyce Carol Oates to Proust. It’s about the joy and pleasure of books, about learning from and escaping into them, and possibly even hiding behind them. It’s about whether or not books are better than real life.

It’s also a book about a Swedish girl called Sara, her elderly American penfriend Amy and what happens when you land a very different kind of bookshop in the middle of a town so broken it’s almost beyond repair.

Or is it?

The Readers of Broken Wheel has touches of 84 Charing Cross Road, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Chocolat, but adds an off-beat originality and intelligence all its own.

Source: Goodreads

I got this book through netgalley.

I am slightly conflicted about this book. By the time I finally got into it and started liking it, it was over.
But maybe that's of the purpose. The town only came back to life thanks to Sara, so it could only start pulling you in once it was alive again.

In all honesty I had expected more from this book. When I had read the description I had expected it to be something in the likes of 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' (a book that happens to be mentioned in the actual book), but it wasn't.

This book was different. Take a broken town, a Swedish girl and the opening of a bookstore and see how everything evolves in a town where everyone all of a sudden seems to come back to life after the arrival of the new girl.

Overall I found that the voice of the book at times too weak to stand up against the expectations. I'll be the first to admit that this book only a handful of times managed to scrape the expectation line I had set for it (and I believe myself to be fairly reasonable when it comes to book related expectations).

The fact that the main character adores books and has spend a lifetime around books, made me like her instantly. When I also found some of her characteristics and traits back in myself, you'd think that I'd instantly relate to her but even with Sara I struggled.

Everything just felt sort of 'flat' and even though the author managed to give her secondary characters their own voice and share their backstories, it was never enough to pull me in.

But I appreciated Sara's love for books and the honorable mentions of many beautiful books throughout the entire story. What I liked even more was that it was books that managed to bring part of this town and its inhabitants back to life, Even more so when you find that Sara manages to find a book for most people in the town and not necessarily by sticking to the obvious choices. We end up with a severly Christian woman buying gay erotica, or an older men being pulled in the world of Bridget Jones.

I found myself starting to enjoy it more and more once the town itself became more vibrant, but it's such a shame that this only started to happen when I embarked the last 100 pages. There were definitely a few remarkable lines in the book, that made me stop and appreciate the text I was holding in my hands. Some of which might just stick with me but it wasn't enough to make the book stand.

In general this book never really managed to enchant me.