#BookReview: The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai

#BookReview: The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal KawaiThe Cat Who Saved the Library (The Cat Who..., #2) by Sōsuke Natsukawa, Louise Heal Kawai
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, coming of age, fantasy, libraries, magical realism
Series: The Cat Who... #2
Pages: 224
Published by HarperVia on April 8, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The long-awaited sequel to the #1 international bestseller The Cat Who Saved Books—a delightful and heartwarming celebration of books, libraries, cats, and the people who love them.
A chronic asthma condition prevents thirteen-year-old Nanami from playing sports or spending time with her friends after school. But nothing can stop her from one of her favorite activities. Nanami loves to read and happily spends much of her free time in the school library, cocooned among the stacks.
Then one day, Nanami notices that, despite the library being as deserted as ever, some of her favorite books, including literary classics like Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar and Anne of Green Gables are disappearing from the shelves. When she alerts the library staff, they dismiss her concerns. But just as Nanami is about to return to her reading, she spots a suspicious man in a gray suit. Eager to discover what he’s up to, she follows him. The chase is cut short when Nanami suffers an asthma attack. By the time she catches her breath, the man has disappeared and all that is left behind is a mysterious light filtering through the library’s familiar passageways.
That’s when Tiger, the talking tabby cat who saves books, comes to the rescue.
Are Nanami and Tiger prepared to face the dangerous challenges that lie ahead? Why are faceless gray soldiers burning books in a stone castle? And what happened to Rintaro, the socially withdrawn hero who helped Tiger save books in a second-hand bookshop?
At a time of increased book bannings worldwide, Sosuke Natsukawa urges us not to underestimate the power of great literature—and to be prepared to defend our freedom to choose.

My Review:

I picked this up for the obvious. It’s clearly a story about a cat, and books, and at least one library, and I’m there for all of those things. That it’s also the follow-up to The Cat Who Saved Books, which I enjoyed very much for all the above reasons – although that’s about a bookstore rather than a library – certainly helped push this book to the top of my virtually towering TBR pile.

Nanami Kosaki is a bit younger than Rintaro Natsuki was when he began his adventure in that first book. Howsomever, she is also very much a child, or a young woman, on the cusp of the next stage of her own maturity, and she is also holding herself back from taking the next leap forward. Rintaro also faced barriers to that next leap, but in Nanami’s case those hurdles are created not just out of fear, but also out of love. And out of the desire that is so often fostered in females, the desire not to upset the people who are only creating those boundaries and barriers because they love us, believe they know what’s best for us, but want us to be safe above all, even if safety is not what we’re built for.

Nanami has chronic asthma that results in severe attacks that leave her completely debilitated if she is not very, very careful. Nanami, a junior high school student, has internalized that need for care at every step to the point where her world has been reduced to the smallest circle possible; the home she shares with her workaholic father, her school, the local library, and the one and only friend who doesn’t treat her as ‘less than’ in every conversation and at every turn.

Like so many people whose movements are restricted in one way or another, Nanami spends a great deal of time in the world of books – hence her daily visits to her local library. She has learned the wisdom of the saying that “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”

But her thorough knowledge of every nook and cranny of that library tells Nanami that something is wrong. Books are missing. Not the usual ebb and flow of check-in and check-out of a public library but rather that vast swaths of books are disappearing all at once and not coming back.

A situation that absolutely cannot be borne. Which is where Tiger the Tabby steps through the back wall of the library, allowing her to follow the mysterious book thief back to his own world. A place where books aren’t merely burned, but where they are torn from time and space and memory so they lose their power to move the world through the hearts and minds of the people who read them.

Escape Rating B: The US cover of this second book doesn’t do Tiger the Tabby any more justice than the US cover of the first book did. Tiger’s considerably more dignified picture in the UK cover at right also does a much better job of giving Tiger his due.

But this story isn’t about Tiger any more than the first one was. Tiger is an important character, but his function in both stories is to open the way and guide the protagonist – not to lead the charge.

The stakes feel higher in this second book on multiple levels. On one level, it’s about Nanami and her future, just as the first book was about Rin and his. He was on the precipice of choosing between out and in, between rejecting the world and facing it. Nanami’s decision is harder because she’s not so much choosing between safety and adventure as she is choosing between letting her illness and the people who love her take care of her, or figuring out how to face the world as it is and her condition as it is on her own terms. To expand her real horizons to the limit that they can be – a limit that may not be infinite but is considerably larger than feels ‘safe’ to the people who love her and worry about her. She’ll have to stand her own ground against people who truly do mean well, to defend her corner against a world that will push hard to keep her in that corner, even when her asthma exhausts her to the point of passing out.

That the fight that Tiger the Tabby guides her to is, to her, much bigger than the mere fight for life, gives her a springboard of accomplishment from which to wage that fight, but she has to get there first.

Which is where the heart of the story, and the depth of Nanami’s heart, comes in.

Because, while this is about the books, it’s not just about the books. And it’s certainly not about the books as containers – even though it feels that way at first. This is a story about the power of what’s in books to move people – which moves the world.

Which leads even deeper, to a story about power, and how power is applied, and those who feel they have the right to keep their hands on the levers of power. Leading to a story that feels like it’s speaking to this moment, even though this book was published over a year ago in the original Japanese, and was intended to point at the vast (and continuing and increasing) amount of book banning that was – and still is – happening around the world.

In the end, this is a story that focuses hard on the very current debate about whether empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is a strength or a weakness. The forces arrayed against Nanami believe that empathy is a weakness. That reading the ‘wrong’ books fosters empathy and should therefore be eliminated by any means necessary.

Nanami believes the opposite, that empathy is a strength, although she would certainly agree that reading is a powerful force for fostering empathy. And it’s the power of Nanami’s heart, her empathy for others and their empathy for her, that means that she never goes into this battle alone, and that she emerges with new strength, a whole heart, and a whole lot of books, when her battle is won.

But it’s clear at the end that the war is not over. As it is not in the real world. Nanami seems to have found her road to her OWN future at the end of this story, and we get a glimpse of Rintaro’s life as it is now to see that he also reached out and grabbed his own happiness and fulfillment, but Tiger the Tabby is still out there, just waiting to guide a new hero to the next front of this neverending conflict.

 

A+ #BookReview: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

A+ #BookReview: Death of the Author by Nnedi OkoraforDeath of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: African Futurism, books and reading, robots, science fiction
Pages: 448
Published by William Morrow on January 14, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The future of storytelling is here.
Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.
In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.
What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.
Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.

My Review:

Don’t let the title fool you. This book is nothing like what that title leads you to imagine. Or anything like what you might possibly be imagining.

The story is a Möbius strip. The end is the beginning is the end is the beginning in an endless and utterly fascinating loop.

There’s a story here – and there’s a story within that story – and both are utterly captivating but are entirely different.

From the start, it’s Zelu’s story. She’s Nigerian-American, she’s paraplegic, she’s not all that interested in marrying, and her career – such as it is – is one that her large, extended family doesn’t seem to want to understand.

Which is par for their course, as what they really don’t seem to want to understand is Zelu herself. She doesn’t fit into ANY of the boxes that her family expects her to fit into – and she can’t stop beating at the limitations of those boxes even as she does her damndest to expel herself from them.

The thing is, her family might be right about a lot of the things that press her down. On the other hand, her family has done their damndest to emplace many of the attitudes and expectations that weigh her down.

All out of love, of course. No matter how much it hurts.

So when she’s fired from her barely-supporting job as an adjunct professor of creative writing, and she receives yet another publisher’s rejection of the fruits of her own creative writing – a novel she’s been shopping around for YEARS – while she’s at her sister’s destination wedding in Tobago – she has a meltdown. And it’s a big one.

But it’s also a productive one. In the depths of her despondency, her acknowledgement that everything she thought she’d done isn’t working for her – at all – she acts out and breaks out. She pours her heart and her feelings into a novel that she can’t make herself stop writing even though it’s nothing like anything she’s ever done before.

And it turns out to be a literary science fiction masterpiece.

Which is where the other half of The Death of the Author comes in. Because we get to read Zelu’s groundbreaking work, Rusted Robots, as the literary world and the entertainment world do their damndest to chew it up and spit it out in a form that will get the most money out of the most markets.

And if the author becomes a media darling and then a media scapegoat, well that’s the price of fame for a woman who doesn’t fit ANY of the molds that anyone wants to put her in – because she never has.

And never, ever will.

Escape Rating A+: The Death of the Author got its hooks into me early, and those hooks didn’t release until nearly 4 in the morning, when I turned the last page and my mind went spinning as the creator became the created and the act of creation worked both ways and it made me rethink everything I’d read.

Yes, I went into the story expecting Zelu to die in the end. The format of her part of the story, transcripts of interviews of the people in her life telling her story from their own biased perspectives, leads the reader to think this was written after her death.

But it’s the story that captivates, as each ‘contribution’ is set against Zelu’s own narrative of her own journey, when we get to hear the screams she kept on the inside because no one EVER seems to have truly seen her or listened to her or believed in her.

It’s also a story about the facile judgments of the anonymous faceless masses of the internet, and the way that their approbation never fills her up because it’s always manufactured and false and just as easily turned against her as their narrative requires.

And then there’s the story she wrote, the story that seems to consume everyone it touches, Rusted Robots. It’s a post-apocalyptic, post-human story of robots and artificial intelligences acting on their programming. We are their creators, we made them in our own image, and they act entirely too much like us whether they look like us or not.

Rusted Robots reads like a different variation on the seven robotic circles of hell in Service Model, even as the rusted robots themselves, Ankara and Ijele, transcend their programming, together. That their world is saved by the power of storytelling gave the whole book a breathtaking, OMG WTF happened, utterly SFnal ‘Sensawunda’, at the same time that it sends the reader’s mind scurrying back to the beginning to watch the whole, marvelous epic unfold again.

A- #BookReview: The Banned Books Club by Brenda Novak

A- #BookReview: The Banned Books Club by Brenda NovakThe Banned Books Club by Brenda Novak
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 352
Published by Mira on September 17, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

She left her hometown following a scandal—but family loyalty is dragging her back…
Despite their strained relationship, when Gia Rossi’s sister, Margot, begs her to come home to Wakefield, Iowa, to help with their ailing mother, Gia knows she has no choice. After her rebellious and at-times-tumultuous teen years, Gia left town with little reason to look back. But she knows Margot’s borne the brunt of their mother’s care and now it’s Gia’s turn to help, even if it means opening old wounds.
As expected, Gia’s homecoming is far from welcome. There’s the Banned Books Club she started after the PTA overzealously slashed the high school reading list, which is right where she left it. But there is also Mr. Hart, her former favorite teacher. The one who was fired after Gia publicly and painfully accused him of sexual misconduct. The one who prompted Gia to leave behind a very conflicted town the minute she turned eighteen. The one person she hoped never to see again.
When Margot leaves town without explanation, Gia sees the cracks in her sister’s “perfect” life for the first time and plans to offer support. But as the town, including members of the book club, takes sides between Gia and Mr. Hart, everything gets harder. Fortunately, she learns that there are people she can depend on. And by standing up for the truth, she finds love and a future in the town she thought had rejected her.

My Review:

I picked this book for today because Sunday is the official start of Banned Books Week, but the blog tour ends Saturday so this was as close as I could get. So here we are. Or rather, there Gia Rossi is, back home in Wakefield, Iowa. Pretty much the last place on Earth she wants to be.

There isn’t exactly an actual Banned Books Club in this book, but once upon a time, back when Gia and her sister Margot were in high school, there was. Before all the shit hit all the fans in town, and Gia left and tried her damndest not to look back.

However, it could be said, and it would be absolutely true, that everything that happens in this book, even though it takes place nearly 20 years later, is a ripple effect of that long ago club.

Gia started the club because she was seemingly a natural-born iconoclast, a person who never met a windmill she didn’t want to tilt at, someone who, when told by her parents and everyone around her explicitly NOT to make waves, would make the biggest waves she could manage to churn up.

Her high school banned The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders and The Handmaid’s Tale from the Honors English reading list. Not that this happened officially, exactly. The PTA browbeat the teacher, who was the head of the English department, into dropping the books. That teacher, Mr. Hart, didn’t stand up for either the books or the students.

If Gia had been a bit older – or a bit more cynical – she would have seen that as a sign. But she wasn’t and she didn’t and thereby hangs half this tale.

But only half because this isn’t just Gia’s story. It’s the story of both Gia and her sister Margot. The rule breaker and the rule follower. The wild child and the golden. The one who left – with the town practically lighting her way with torches and pitchforks – and the one who stayed and did everything she thought she was supposed to do.

Until their mother was diagnosed with cancer and both of their houses of cards came tumbling down.

Escape Rating A-: As I said at the top, this isn’t really a story about that high school banned books club. Very much on the other hand, this is a book that in certain ways fits right in with the kind of books that have been banned.

It tells not just one but two stories that make people uncomfortable – which is what really lies behind all of the book bannings. (Purported reasons for that discomfort certainly vary – but the fact of the discomfort remains the same) The three books that were removed from Gia’s high school reading list have all been repeated targets of challenges and bans for the past 30 years if not longer.

The Banned Books Club combines two stories that make people uncomfortable, stories that some people would prefer not to read about. Gia’s story is about her sexual molestation at the hands of a teacher – and the way that the town divided among itself in the aftermath and literally makes it psychologically damaging for her to remain.

Margot’s story is about domestic abuse. Her angry, controlling husband hasn’t hit her – yet – but the emotional and psychological abuse he dishes out with every breath is even more damaging. But he’s good buddies with the local cops – to the point where they turn a blind eye to his harassment. Even though by this point his wife has fled so he’s not harassing her – his harassment to the point of vandalism is directed at his wife’s family – including her cancer-stricken mother – after Margot flees.

(While some readers may be thinking that the themes of this book are considered fairly tame stuff today and are common plots in women’s fiction, it’s fair to say that some will view Gia’s story as “woke” because the (very young) woman was believed instead of the male authority figure. Margot’s story could also be condemned because it challenges the integrity of the “thin blue line”, and because there’s suddenly a whole lot of nostalgia for the 1950s when divorces were considerably fewer because women had no other options – going all the way to the point where the idea that women should remain even in violent marriages is getting a lot of airplay these days.)

Neither of their stories make for light reading, but they are both important as they are stories about standing up for oneself in spite of the still, small voice in the back of many of our heads telling us not to rock the boat, that things could always be worse.

So, as a book, I found both Gia’s and Margot’s not exactly fun to read but compelling in the way that each of them worked out a way forwards – no matter how desperate in Margot’s case. However, she planned expertly in spite of her many, justified fears and executed that plan brilliantly – and I always give points for competence especially in desperate situations.

In the end, I did feel like there was a lot of unpleasant crap in the family dynamics between Gia and Margot and between the sisters and their parents that contributed to pretty much everything – especially the way that Gia left town and stayed virtually gone for nearly two decades. Those issues didn’t so much get resolved as swept under the rug in the wake of their mother’s death. Which is exactly what families do, but it left this reader feeling like there was a bit of a loose end that I’d like to have seen resolved – or at least acknowledged – before the end.

But I did like that Gia decides to move back to Wakefield and open a bookstore – a store she plans to name, of course and fittingly for a happy ending that brings the story around full circle, the Banned Books Shoppe. A place where banned books will be loved and recommended, bought and sold, available and read, but never, ever banned!

A- #AudioBookReview: More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa

A- #AudioBookReview: More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric OzawaMore Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, #2) by Satoshi Yagisawa, Eric Ozawa
Narrator: Catherine Ho
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Amazon, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, literary fiction, relationship fiction, world literature
Series: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop #2
Pages: 176
Length: 5 hours and 21 minutes
Published by Harper Perennial, HarperAudio on July 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

In this charming and emotionally resonant follow up to the internationally bestselling Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi Yagisawa paints a poignant and thoughtful portrait of life, love, and how much books and bookstores mean to the people who love them.
Set again in the beloved Japanese bookshop and nearby coffee shop in the Jimbocho neighborhood of Toyko, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop deepens the relationship between Takako, her uncle Satoru , and the people in their lives. A new cast of heartwarming regulars have appeared in the shop, including an old man who wears the same ragged mouse-colored sweater and another who collects books solely for the official stamps with the author’s personal seal.
Satoshi Yagisawa illuminates the everyday relationships between people that are forged and grown through a shared love of books. Characters leave and return, fall in and out of love, and some eventually die. As time passes, Satoru, with Takako’s help, must choose whether to keep the bookshop open or shutter its doors forever. Making the decision will take uncle and niece on an emotional journey back to their family’s roots and remind them again what a bookstore can mean to an individual, a neighborhood, and a whole culture.

My Review:

At the end of the first book, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, it seems as if life is on the upswing for first-person narrator Takako, her eccentric uncle Satoru, and his used bookshop in the Jimbocho neighborhood of Tokyo, a place that is positively chock full of used book stores.

As this second book opens, life seems to be going well for Takoko. She’s moving forward with her life, has a job that she enjoys, a solid and happy and solidly happy romantic relationship, her uncle is happily complaining – which is his way – her aunt seems to have made peace with her uncle and their relationship seems stable and happy.

Even the bookshop seems to be doing well.

Howsomever, just as the first book started out as sad fluff, with Takoko in the depths of depression and eventually working her way out through working at the bookshop, rekindling her childhood closeness with her uncle, rediscovering the joys of reading and slowly becoming involved with the life of the neighborhood, these “more days” at the bookshop transit the path in the other direction.

At the beginning, all seems to be well. But as Takoko observes each time she returns to the bookshop to spend time and help out – the reality is that happiness is slipping out from under them.

Some parts of the various situations can be fixed – but not all of them. And not the saddest of all.

Escape Rating A-: I picked up More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop because, having fallen in love with the first book, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, I wanted more, well, days at the Morisaki Bookshop.

And that’s exactly what I got – and it was beautiful. I’m very glad that I read it – or rather that I gave in to temptation and listened to Catherine Ho as the voice of Takako again because she does an excellent job of embodying the character.

Like the previous book, this is not a story of great doings and big happenings. It’s a quiet story, a book of slices of life, specifically the lives of Takako, her family, her friends, and the Morisaki Bookshop which so much of those lives revolve around.

But, and this is a bit of a trigger warning, the progression of this story is the opposite of the first. It starts high and ends low – even though the epilogue does a good job of letting the reader know that life moves on – even from the depths of grief.

Howsomever, the depths of that grief are very deep indeed. Especially in the excellent audio recording, where it feels as if it’s Takako’s voice telling you just how heartbroken so many of the characters are. It’s very effective, and very affecting. Readers who are already grieving someone close to their hearts will find that part of the story gut-wrenching, cathartic, or both – as this reader certainly did.

So maybe don’t listen to that part while you’re driving because the urge to cry right along with Takako is pretty much irresistible.

That being said, the whole thing is lovely and charming and filled to the brim with the joy of books and reading and the people who love both – just as the first book was. I’m as happy I read this second book as I was the first – even if it did leave me a bit weepy.

This series, along with Before the Coffee Gets Cold, The Kamogawa Food Detectives, What You are Looking For Is In the Library, The Dallergut Dream Department Store and the upcoming We’ll Prescribe You a Cat are part of a marvelously charming and extremely cozy trend of magical – sometimes with real magic – comfort reads and I’m enjoying it tremendously.

If you’re looking for some cozy, comforting reads, you might want to snuggle up with some of these books too!

Grade A #AudioBookReview: What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Alison Watts

Grade A #AudioBookReview: What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Alison WattsWhat You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
Narrator: Alison Watts
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, magical realism
Pages: 304
Length: 7 hours and 19 minutes
Published by Hanover Square Press, Harlequin Audio on September 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

For fans of The Midnight Library and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this charming Japanese novel shows how the perfect book recommendation can change a reader's life.
What are you looking for?
This is the famous question routinely asked by Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. Like most librarians, Komachi has read every book lining her shelves—but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of her library guests. For anyone who walks through her door, Komachi can sense exactly what they’re looking for in life and provide just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it.
Each visitor comes to her library from a different juncture in their careers and dreams, from the restless sales attendant who feels stuck at her job to the struggling working mother who longs to be a magazine editor. The conversation that they have with Sayuri Komachi—and the surprise book she lends each of them—will have life-altering consequences.
With heartwarming charm and wisdom, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a paean to the magic of libraries, friendship and community, perfect for anyone who has ever found themselves at an impasse in their life and in need of a little inspiration.

My Review:

A 21-year old sales assistant, a 35-year old accounts manager, a 40-year old former magazine editor, a 65-year old recent retiree and a 30-year old who hasn’t found his way. Three men and two women. Different ages, different stages of life, different choices IN life. What do they have in common?

Each of these characters is at a crossroads in their lives, and each of them has taken the fork in the road that leads to the library. But not just any library, but the library in the Hatori Community Center, where Sayuri Komachi reigns over the reference desk as she relentlessly stabs her needle into her latest felting project.

Ms. Komachi has a gift, and not just for handicraft.

The characters in this collection of individual stories find their way to Mr. Komachi’s desk in the middle of their first-person narratives. So the reader – or in my case listener – already has an idea of what’s going on in their life at this particular moment and what decision – or lack thereof – has brought them into the busy, bustling Community Center to face its stabbing librarian.

(One of the narrators, that 30-year old who sees himself as a failed artist, both sees and hears Ms. Komachi with her furious needle as a fearsome character from a famous manga that both he and the librarian are familiar with.)

The librarian’s gift is to be the best this librarian has ever heard of at conducting what we call a “reference interview”. Ms. Komachi doesn’t just listen to what each person manages to say that they want, but also to intuit what each one actually wants and what information they need to make that happen – even if they had no idea themselves what was lurking in their heart of hearts.

She gives each person a ‘bonus gift’ from her box of complete handicrafts and sends them on their way, often with puzzled expressions on their faces as they try to figure out how what they blurted out resulted in something never expected but needed all the same.

Escape Rating A: Obviously I picked this up for the title, and I doubt that anyone is surprised by that. However, while I expected to like this book, I was surprised by just how charmed I was by each of the individual stories – whether or not I was feeling that particular character’s particular angst – or not – as they began their narrative.

Each story is individual – at least as it begins – with the initial link between the characters only in their encounter with the Community Center and Ms. Komachi. It’s only as we proceed from one to another we realize that they ARE interconnected, one directly to another, and that their collective connections form a community and ultimately a society.

Which also the theme of the retiree’s story that closes the book.

Because these stories are initially separate, and are told from each narrator’s first-person perspective, the choice the producers made to have a different voice actor for each section feels like the correct one. Each voice actor embodied their character while also making the voices of the people they encountered along their way distinctive.

That different characters therefore voiced Ms. Komachi rather differently, which also reflected their individual perspectives and worked particularly well. Even though by listening I missed the artist’s rendering of the individual characters that accompanied each story, I’m still happy that I listened to the audio instead.

As much as I enjoyed the narration, which I very much did, it’s the stories themselves that give the collection its charm, as was true in similar books such as The Kamogawa Food Detectives and Before the Coffee Gets Cold – the latter of which this book is frequently compared to, along with The Midnight Library of which this reader is considerably less certain but now rather curious about.

The stories in THIS book are all slices of life, and slices of very familiar lives; a young woman in her first full-time job not sure if it’s what she really wants or what she wants to do with the life in front of her before it passes her by, a more established man who KNOWS he’s not doing what he wants to do with his life but is afraid to give up security to pursue his dream, a working mother whose work dreams have been sacrificed to the care of a loved and wanted child but is having difficulty reconciling her plans with her reality, a 30 year old still living at home who has no confidence in himself and a retired ‘company man’ who can’t figure out who he is or how he fits in a world where he has no job and no set place in that world.

They all read like real people, their crises all feel like part of the real world, and the solutions all seem very possible. But there’s still just a bit of magic in these seemingly mundane tales, and it’s not just the magic of Ms. Komachi and her knack for finding the right book for the right person at the right time.

It’s the magic of getting caught up in, not just one lovely story, but five lovely stories – all with just the right touch of honeyed sweetness in their endings.

#BookReview: Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum translated by Shanna Tan

#BookReview: Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum translated by Shanna TanWelcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum, Shanna Tan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, literary fiction, world literature
Pages: 320
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on February 20, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The Korean smash hit available for the first time in English, a slice-of-life novel for readers of Matt Haig's The Midnight Library and Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of AJ Fikry.
Yeongju is burned out. With her high-flying career, demanding marriage, and busy life in Seoul, she knows she should feel successful, but all she feels is drained. Yet an abandoned dream nags at her, and in a leap of faith, she leaves her old life behind. Quitting her job and divorcing her husband, Yeongju moves to a small residential neighborhood outside the city, where she opens the Hyunam-dong Bookshop.
For the first few months, all Yeongju does is cry, deterring visitors. But the long hours in the shop give her time to mull over what makes a good bookseller and store, and as she starts to read hungrily, host author events, and develop her own bookselling philosophy, she begins to ease into her new setting. Surrounded by friends, writers, and the books that connect them all, she finds her new story as the Hyunam-dong Bookshop transforms into an inviting space for lost souls to rest, heal, and remember that it's never too late to scrap the plot and start again.

My Review:

The title of the book makes the point of the story, as 30something, utterly stressed out Yeongju transforms herself into an independent bookstore owner in a close-knit but off the beaten path community.

Just as her high-pressure job and her equally pressured marriage once consumed Yeongju – sending her into a spiral of depression – opening the bookstore and returning to her childhood love of reading starts out as the antidote to those feelings.

Not that either the reader nor her concerned customers are entirely aware of that at first. We’re all aware of her depression, as her initial months of opening the store consist of her sitting on a stool inside the store with tears running down her face.

She’s clearly hit bottom in a whole lot of ways, but neither the reader nor her potential customers know precisely why. Not that her customers necessarily should, at least not until she’s willing to tell someone, but she’s drowning so hard that she’s closed off her internal life to the reader as well.

Which is similar in a lot of ways to the opening of the utterly charming and absolutely marvelous Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – with one critical difference. The reader gets a much more thorough picture of that protagonist, Takako, and her internal, utterly depressed, life because even though Takako isn’t talking much her mother and her uncle talk at her, to her, and about her enough for the reader to see inside her slough of despond and start to feel for her even as she starts to pull herself out.

At first, we know very little of what brought Yeongju to the bookshop or much of why she’s sitting in the midst of it weeping. But we do see the bookshop-owning butterfly emerge from her dark and tattered cocoon to take stock of the life she actually has and start looking towards its sustainability – for herself and for the people who come to see her bookshop as part of the warp and weft of their lives as much as she does.

And as Yeongju invests herself in welcoming others to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, we finally begin to see glimpses of what drives her, what occasionally drives her back into her shell of depression, and the way that once she begins reaching out to others, they all begin to sustain each other.

Escape Rating C: I fell in love with both last week’s The Kamogawa Food Detectives and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and picked this up hoping for something similar – or even in a sweet spot in between the two.

Sadly, that was not to be.

As much as I love books about books and reading, especially stories about bookstores and bookstore owners, I had a hard time getting into this one. It took me a while – entirely too long for the sake of my own personal reading schedule, in fact – to figure out that what was missing here that both of those books I hoped it would be a readalike for had was a central character or characters to carry the story.

Not that Yeongju isn’t there, but, well, for the first half of the book she really isn’t all there. She’s going through the motions, but we don’t see inside her nearly enough to be certain about what has brought her to that initial, depressing pass or get truly invested in how she gets herself out.

As she comes back to herself, and the bookshop reaches out to its community and the wider world as a result, we do start getting glimpses into what brings the other characters in the story to become part of the shop and the stories within, but Yeongju uses the increasing busy-ness of the shop and the life she has focused around it as a way of not looking back at what brought her there in the first place.

In the end, this was okay but not what I was hoping for. It has some of the elements of the two books that brought me here, that journey from depression to healing through the power of books and reading and community that is at the heart of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and the loosely linked slices of life stories of The Kamogawa Food Detectives, but it doesn’t have the strong, central linchpin character to carry the book as a whole the way that both of those books did.

Which leaves me looking forward that much more and harder to the follow-up to Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, titled More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, coming in July. Because I do, still, very much, love books about books and reading and the transformative power of the two and have high hopes that the second book in that series will hit the same sweet spot as the first.

Review: The Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar

Review: The Circumference of the World by Lavie TidharThe Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, science fiction, time travel
Pages: 256
Published by Tachyon Publications on September 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Caught between realities, a mathematician, a book dealer, and a mobster desperately seek a notorious book that disappears upon being read. Only the author, a rakish sci-fi writer, knows whether his popular novel is truthful or a hoax. In a story that is cosmic, inventive, and sly, multi-award-winning author Lavie Tidhar (Central Station) travels from the emergence of life to the very ends of the universe.
Delia Welegtabit discovered two things during her childhood on a South Pacific island: her love for mathematics and a novel that isn’t supposed to exist. But the elusive book proves unexpectedly dangerous. When Delia’s husband Levi goes missing, she seeks help from Daniel Chase, a young, face-blind book dealer.
Lode Stars was written by the infamous Eugene Charles Hartley: legendary pulp science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes. In Hartley’s novel, a doppelganger of Delia searches for her missing father in a strange star system with three black holes.
Oskar Lens, a Russian mobster in the midst of an existential crisis, is determined to find a copy of Lode Stars. Oskar believes that the novel provides protection from unseen aliens, and that reality is only an unreliable memory that is billions of years old.
But is any of Lode Stars real? Was Hartley a cynical conman on a quest for wealth and immortality, creating a religion he did not believe in? Or was he a visionary who truly discovered the secrets of the universe?

My Review:

Unreal books, like H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, are a very real phenomenon. If you’re thinking that’s not quite correct, that Neal Stephenson wrote Necronomicon, your memory is playing a bit of a trick on you. Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon in 1999. The first mention of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon was back in 1924 in Lovecraft’s short story, The Hound”, more than three decades before Stephenson was born. They’re not the same book.

Fictional books, as opposed to works of fiction,  as a genre, drive librarians crazy, to the point where library catalogs will have entries to said ‘unreal’ books with notes to explain to the searcher that they are looking for something that does not and never has existed. Which the searcher may or may not believe, depending on how deeply into the thing they already are. Which brings us right back to The Circumference of the World and the likely, possibly, probably fictional book within.

Lode Stars, written by the infamous Eugene Charles Hartley, may or may not be one of those unreal books. Delia Welegtabit is certain that she held a copy of the book in her own two hands when she was a child in Vanuatu.

Delia doesn’t care that the book is believed to disappear upon reading. She always preferred math to fiction, so didn’t read it then and doesn’t care about it now, as an adult living in London. But she does care about her husband who has gotten caught up in the obsession over Lode Stars, and has disappeared in his pursuit of the damn thing.

Unfortunately he’s not alone, either in that obsession or that pursuit. So Delia is chasing Levi, while the bookseller Daniel and the Russian mobster Oscar are searching for the book while Oscar, at least, doesn’t seem to care who gets in his way.

Escape Rating B: There’s always a question in the reader’s mind as to whether Lode Stars ever was a real book. That its author is clearly an avatar for L. Ron Hubbard furthers that question pretty far down the road to skepticism.

But the story is about the point where the book’s real existence no longer matters – it’s all about the obsession. Which doesn’t stop there being a whole lot of very interesting – if slightly skewed and frequently amalgamated – portraits of some of the masters of the ‘Golden Age’ of Science Fiction in the part of the story that covers the time period when Eugene Charles Hartley created the thing in the first place.

(If that part of this multithreaded and sometimes tangled story sounds interesting, I highly recommend Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding, which treats the period considerably more factually while still exploring all the juicy gossip and is amazingly readable over all.)

The story of The Circumference of the World is indeed multithreaded, and circles its way through multiple, disparate perspectives AND most definitely themes on its way around that circumference.

The main character of Lode Stars is not only named Delia, but that character spends that story in search of her father through the galaxy just as the real Delia is searching for her husband on Earth. The story jumps as much through time and history as it does through space, and touches on, not just the history of science fiction but also love, mental illness and the conman artistry of Lode Star’s author.

It’s a book that leaves the reader not certain where they’ve been or where the story went, or if it even came to a satisfactory conclusion, but Delia’s quest is conducted at a wild pace that keeps the reader turning pages until the very last.

One final note, because I feel the need to close the circle back to the Lovecraft reference I started with. There’s another real book that deals with a fictional book that also traipses its way through the Golden Age of SF on its way to a much more certain determination of whether or not the book that the characters are obsessing over is a real book or just a real fake. That story is The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge, and it centers on a book by H.P. Lovecraft of the same name that may be a real book, or may be a real fake. And just as in The Circumference of the World, it’s up to the reader to determine whether or not they are satisfied with the answer at the end.

Review: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

Review: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi YagisawaDays at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, Eric Ozawa
Narrator: Catherine Ho
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, literary fiction, world literature
Series: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop #1
Pages: 160
Length: 5 hours
Published by Harper Perennial, HarperAudio on July 4, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

Hidden in Jimbocho, Tokyo, is a booklover's paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building lies a shop filled with hundreds of second-hand books.

Twenty-five-year-old Takako has never liked reading, although the Morisaki bookshop has been in her family for three generations. It is the pride and joy of her uncle Satoru, who has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife Momoko left him five years earlier.

When Takako's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above the shop. Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takako is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the Morisaki bookshop.

As summer fades to autumn, Satoru and Takako discover they have more in common than they first thought. The Morisaki bookshop has something to teach them both about life, love, and the healing power of books.

My Review:

Takako has sunk into a slough of despond, depressed beyond imagining after learning that her boyfriend had been engaged to someone else during the entire year of their relationship. As they worked together – along with his fiancee! – Takako has quit her job to get away from the pain, and seems to be intent on leaving the waking world behind.

It’s a bit like the opening of Cassandra in Reverse – without the time travel. Or at least, without Cassandra’s peculiar method of traveling through time.

Takako, with more than a bit of a push from her mother, finds herself being herded in a direction she had no intention of going. But helping her uncle Satoru with his used bookstore – while living rent free above the shop – is at least half a step up from returning home and letting her mother remind her she’s a failure at every turn.

Which is where the story stops resembling Cassandra in Reverse, as the only time travel that Takako is capable of is the kind that happens when you step into the pages of a book and are whisked away, whether to the past, the present, or the future.

As the days slip past, at first slowly – and mostly in sleep – Takako emerges from her blanket-wrapped cocoon and becomes involved with what’s inside her uncle’s store. At first it’s the customers, and then it’s the books and then it’s the whole neighborhood.

The store and the books within it are the saving of Takako. And as her year of taking a vacation from her life saves her, so is she able to save her uncle as well.

Escape Rating A-: This is simply a lovely story. It’s a bit of a combination of Cassandra in Reverse, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro and The Cat Who Saved Books, but it’s considerably more down to earth than any of those antecedents.

This is not a highly dramatic story. After the opening, where Takako learns that her boyfriend is a narcissistic asshat, there are no big scenes until very nearly the end. Rather, the story quietly unspools as we climb into that cocoon with Takako and then watch her gently pull herself out.

The story of those Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is really a story about the way that books cushion us, comfort us and save us. It’s about the joy of discovery and the even greater joy of sharing that discovery. It’s a story that starts out quietly sad and quietly and charmingly goes on its way to becoming quietly happy.

Which made this little book an unexpected comfort read and an equally unexpected comfort listen. I fell into Takako’s life just as she fell into sleep, but the waking up was considerably less traumatic for the reader than it was for the character – who was perfectly embodied by the narrator. I didn’t feel like I was reading a book, I felt like Takako was telling me the story of her year at her uncle’s bookshop and what happened after.

And it was an utterly charming story, extremely well told, every step of her way. It was exactly what I was looking for, and I hope that when you’re looking for a lovely read or listen to let you slip into a world of books, it will be that for you, too.

Review: The Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis

Review: The Echo of Old Books by Barbara DavisThe Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, historical fiction, historical romance, magical realism, mystery
Pages: 443
Published by Lake Union Publishing on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer’s affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners—an emotional fingerprint only she can read. When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound volumes that appear to have never been published, her gift quickly becomes an obsession. Not only is each inscribed with a startling incrimination, but the authors, Hemi and Belle, tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance.
With no trace of how these mysterious books came into the world, Ashlyn is caught up in a decades-old literary mystery, beckoned by two hearts in ruins, whoever they were, wherever they are. Determined to learn the truth behind the doomed lovers’ tale, she reads on, following a trail of broken promises and seemingly unforgivable betrayals. The more Ashlyn learns about Hemi and Belle, the nearer she comes to bringing closure to their love story—and to the unfinished chapters of her own life.

My Review:

Instead of Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Echo of Old Books is a tale of Four Tragedies and an HEA – at least – and on both counts. The story folds together the bitter and the sweet into a saga that begins in mystery, middles in anger and ends in hope while it puts the readers, both of the story and within the story, through a wringer of emotions, keeping them turning the pages of not just the book in hand, but of the two mysterious books within.

It all begins with Hemi and Belle and the two seemingly anonymous, most likely privately published books that hold their separate perspectives on their clearly doomed, inevitably tragic WW2-era romance. But those little books are only the beginning of the web that has been woven.

A web that catches rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer within its sticky strands. At first, she is snared by the emotions that she can feel pouring off the pages. And then by the mystery of how these two books came to be.

She knows, with her gift of psychometry, that the emotions held within the pages are real – but can’t be certain whether the story told within is the true story of the seemingly star-crossed lovers or merely a fiction intended to conceal a deeper emotional truth.

As she reads, and as we read with her, she also becomes caught up in the puzzle of it all. Were Hemi and Belle real? If so, who were they? And how far will she need to travel in order to learn that truth?

Her search takes her to an intrepid librarian who ferrets out much of the historical data with a twinkle in her eye and a spring in her step. But the real treasure trove of information comes from Ethan Manning, who brought the books – along with many other considerably more mundane works – from his late father’s library to the used bookstore where Ashlyn first encountered Remembering Belle and Belle’s response in Forever, and Other Stories.

Together they read the story of his great-aunt Marian (nicknamed Belle in the books) and the love of her life. Whoever he was and however he broke her heart – just as she broke his. Along the way, they learn more than either of them wanted to know about a past that STILL isn’t quite dead.

And discover that the tragedies locked in their own pasts do not mean that they can’t find a brighter future, if they can just manage to paradoxically, let it go.

Escape Rating A: I’m pretty sure I initially grabbed this for the cover. Because books. Seemingly endless stacks of books. I couldn’t resist the story even if I can now manage to walk out of a bookstore without carrying stacks of books out with me, if only because text is hard these days and ebooks are much easier to read and to carry.

Howsomever, I moved this book to a bit earlier in the week for two reasons. One, I was hoping for an unequivocal happy ending, which wasn’t possible in some of this week’s books and seemed disappointingly out of reach in yesterday’s.

But even if this did not turn out to have a happy ending I could tell that it was at least going to have a cathartic resolution of some kind. Even if that resolution was bittersweet or downright sad. I needed something definitive, and I most definitely got it in this absorbing, compulsive page-turner.

I got all of that and more in The Echo of Old Books.

This is kind of a timeslip story, and it’s also more than a bit of a treasure hunt story. And appropriately, it’s the timeslip, the story within the books themselves, that grabs both Ashlyn and the reader first. So the story of Belle and Hemi dominates the early parts of the narrative in a way that is both clever and absorbing.

We also start out Belle and Hemi’s story knowing it’s going to be tragic, so it’s not exactly a spoiler that their 1941 idyll gets, well, spoiled. What we, and Ashlyn, are desperate to learn is how. And the way that the story spools out, at first being a whole lot of Belle and Hemi with only hints of Ashlyn, carefully shifts over the course of the story to less and less of the past – even as it gets more searing and races towards its seemingly inevitable denouement – and more of Ashlyn and now Ethan’s presents.

And their own searing, scarring pasts. The more we learn about both couples, the more we hope for HEAs all around – no matter how impossible that might seem. We become invested in both stories every bit as much as Ashlyn does Belle’s.

The Echo of Old Books was absolutely the right book at the right time for this reader, with its combination of historical mystery, tragic romance and historical ambiance both in Belle and Hemi’s 1941 and Ashlyn and Ethan’s “present day” of 1984.

I’m definitely going to be snapping up this author’s next book as soon as I see it. In the meantime, I’ll be picking up a copy of her next most recent book, The Keeper of Happy Endings, for the next time I need a book with an absorbing puzzle, a bit of an ugly cry in the middle, and satisfying, cathartic resolution with hopes of an HEA to keep me turning pages until the heartstopping end.

Review: The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

Review: The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke NatsukawaThe Cat Who Saved Books by Sōsuke Natsukawa, Louise Heal Kawai
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, coming of age, fantasy, magical realism
Series: The Cat Who... #1
Pages: 198
Published by HarperVia on December 7, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

A celebration of books, cats, and the people who love them, infused with the heartwarming spirit of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles.
Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookstore he inherited from his beloved bookworm grandfather. Then, a talking cat named Tiger appears with an unusual request. The feline asks for—or rather, demands—the teenager’s help in saving books with him. The world is full of lonely books left unread and unloved, and Tiger and Rintaro must liberate them from their neglectful owners. 
Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different mazes to set books free. Through their travels, Tiger and Rintaro meet a man who leaves his books to perish on a bookshelf, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publishing drone who only wants to create bestsellers. Their adventures culminate in one final, unforgettable challenge—the last maze that awaits leads Rintaro down a realm only the bravest dare enter...

My Review:

When we first meet Rintaro Natsuki, he has come to a fork in his road, at the point where he’s going to have to take it whether he wants to or not. He’s just been orphaned for the second time. When his parents died, he was still a child, and packed off to his grandfather without any choice or protest on his part.

At his grandfather’s death, Rintaro is in high school, even if he skips class a lot. He’s old enough to have a voice in his future – if he can come to terms with the reality of his loss. And if he can manage to reach out of his own social isolation to take it.

His legacy from his grandfather is a beautiful, marvelous and just barely profitable second-hand bookstore. A place that Rintaro has no desire to leave, but he seems to have no option to stay. At least not until the talking cat Tiger the Tabby swaggers out of the back of the bookstore and demands that Rintaro come with him on a journey to save books.

Rintaro loves books and reading. He also has nothing better to do and no motivation to do it. So he follows the cat through the suddenly endless book stacks and emerges into a labyrinth of wonder and danger. He’ll need not just courage and a bit of cunning, but every single drop of his love of reading to save the endangered books – and himself along the way.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this one up for the cat and the books, in that order. Which reminds me that the cat pictured on the US cover does not do Tiger the Tabby justice. The UK cover (pictured at left) does a much better job of giving Tiger his due.

But the story, of course, isn’t really about the cat. It is, however, at least in part about the way that cats – or any companion animals – can save us even from ourselves if we just let them. And the way that books and reading can give us time and space and tools to save ourselves if we let them into our minds just as the cats do when we let them into our hearts.

It’s also a bit of magical realism that leads into a very modern type of fairy tale. Tiger leads Rintaro into a series of labyrinths where books and reading are under assault in the guise of the love of books combined with bowing and scraping to market pressures and other distractions of modern life to save books by means that will, in the end, destroy them.

I think the story does conflate the love of the container – the physical book – with the love of what it contains and the experience of reading. I’m a bit concerned about that as I’m mostly an ebook reader because the genres I read are not widely represented in large print. If I were confined to the physical artifact I’d miss out on the thing I really want out of reading – the immersion in the story that the physical AND the electronic article contain and present for my enjoyment.

I digress just a bit.

What makes The Cat Who Saved Books such a lovely little read, however, is the totality of Rintaro’s journey. Not just the thoughtfully scary labyrinths where books go to die in the name of loving them, but Rintaro’s first steps on that path to adulthood. Because the story is about Rintaro’s chance to choose his life. To stay a socially withdrawn hikikomori, always dependent on someone else to deal with the world he has retreated from, or to take up the reins of the bookstore and his own life and learn to stand on his own. And that’s the part of the story that grabs the heart in its sharp, feline claws.

Because this is a book about books and reading, I can’t resist leaving this review without including a couple of readalikes. Any reader of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld will recognize that the way the back of the bookstore opens into endless shelves means that the store connects to ‘L’ space, the liminal place where all great libraries connect. The Discworld is not at all like The Cat Who Saved Books but that love of reading certainly exists in both places. The Girl Who Reads on the Métro by Christine Féret-Fleury is another lovely story about someone looking for a purpose who finds it in books and reading and loving them and the people she associates with them. And last but not least, more in tone than in specific, “All the World’s Treasures” by Kimberly Pauley, included in Never Too Old to Save the World, a story about a young woman inheriting a shop from her grandmother and discovering that there are connections to more places and infinitely more treasures than she ever imagined.