When you go to college for four years and come out of it with a degree in library science, you’re almost obligated to love any book with the words “library” or “librarian” in the description. This is why when I went into Barnes and Noble, gift card in hand, Jenny Colgan’s The Bookshop on the Corner was the first thing that actually made me want to spend half of the thirty bucks I’d been gifted. (No offense to B&B, but some of their paperbacks are seriously overpriced. In my opinion anyway). 

This novel tells the story of twenty-nine year old librarian, Nina Redmond, whose life in a tiny, book/ridden townhouse with her roommate Surinder crumbles around her when the library decides to downsize and head in a more technological direction. Faced with this, Nina decides to pack up her books, purchase a van to store them, and head from Birmingham, England to a tiny village in Scotland where she opens up a mobile bookshop called the Little Shop of Happy Ever After. 

I gave this book four stars on Goodreads because the setting of the countryside and the way the characters interacted and were portrayed in this setting gave me this pleasant sense of warmth. I would equate this Jenny Colgan novel to curling up on the sofa and sipping a hot cup of tea. Or, one of those cute and comforting stories you see presented in television, where the narrator’s voice is that of a whispery, old man or woman and the camera zooms in through the window on to the main character and then pans out into the story. 

Books like these are dear to me because I feel as though they give me a break from contemporary books that take on serious topics such as suicide, disease, heartbreak, etc. They also bring me back to some type of positive reality when I’ve read one to many dystopia novels–which with the growing popularity of that genre, is too many to count. If you’re in need of comfort food for the mind, The Bookshop on the Corner is the way to go.