I have not read many books by Brenda Novak, but the title and synopsis of this one pulled me in. The previous book I read by this author was more romantic suspense, but this one is more of a women’s fiction novel.
The Bookstore on the Beach is an April 2021 release by MIRA Publishers
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book, all opinions are my own. This post contains affiliate links, see disclosures for more detail.
About the Book:
For fans of Elin Hilderbrand and Mary Kay Andrews, comes New York Times bestselling author Brenda Novak’s newest standalone work of women’s fiction, a big, sweeping novel about family and the ties that bind and challenge us. In this novel, three generations of women from the same family share a house and work together at a bookstore in Colonial Beach over the course of a summer.
How do you start a new chapter when you haven’t closed the book on the last one?
Eighteen months ago, Autumn Divac’s husband went missing. Her desperate search has yielded no answers—she still has no idea where he went or why. After being happily married for twenty years, she can’t imagine moving forward without him, but for the sake of their two teenage children, she has to try.
Autumn takes her kids home for the summer to the charming beachside town where she was raised. She seeks comfort by working alongside her mother and aunt at their quaint bookshop, only to learn that her daughter is facing a life change neither of them saw coming and her mother has been hiding a terrible secret for years. And when she runs into Quinn Vanderbilt—the boy who stole her heart in high school—old feelings start to bubble up again. Is she free to love him, or should she hold out hope for her husband’s return? She can only trust her heart…and hope it won’t lead her astray.
My Thoughts:
I picked this book up for two reasons: one, that the main character Autumn’s husband had disappeared without a trace eighteen months previously and she was trying to find him and what had happened to him. Two, it featured a bookstore and books about books/bookstores/libraries are some of my favorites. This book turned out to be an overall decent read, but it definitely has some shortcomings.
The main thing wrong with this book is that it is so incredibly uneven and tries to introduce far too many “issues” and none of them are dealt with very well. In addition to the missing husband there are also threads of kidnapping/sexual abuse, sexual identity, teen pregnancy, attempted murder of a spouse, rekindling lost love, and quite a few other things. It ends up being more of a mess than an cohesive story.
One problem I have with general fiction that attempts to introduce a mystery storyline is that it is generally not paced well, and the missing husband plot point suffers from that. We never get to know the husband before he is missing, so the reader can’t form a connection to him or to his relationship with Autumn and the kids. When there is eventually some resolution, we have nothing to root for other than the relationship that happens on the page between Autumn and Quinn, even though the relationship with her husband is longer and more complex. Then the ending of the book is totally abrupt and the book feels very unfinished.
Mary’s past should have been revealed to the reader much earlier than it is, because all of her insistence on keeping things from Autumn over and over gets annoying. Again with the uneven pacing, if the reader was let in on it sooner I think I might have been more on Mary’s side.
I did like Taylor’s storyline and it seemed authentic, but there was just way too much going on in this book to give any of it the thoughtful consideration it needed for such heavy topics.
Lastly, there was very little mention of books and the bookstore. Just vaguely in passing and I was disappointed that it wasn’t a bigger part of the story. Overall this is a decent book, if you can set aside the pacing and the over abundance of issues. The characters are interesting and there are some meaningful situations.
About the Author:
Brenda Novak, a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, has penned over sixty novels. She is a five-time nominee for the RITA Award and has won the National Reader’s Choice, the Bookseller’s Best, the Bookbuyer’s Best, and many other awards. She also runs Brenda Novak for the Cure, a charity to raise money for diabetes research (her youngest son has this disease). To date, she’s raised $2.5 million. For more about Brenda, please visit www.brendanovak.com.
SOCIAL:
TWITTER: @Brenda_Novak
Insta: @authorbrendanovak
