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Loveday Cardew has been working at a bookshop in York, England, for about 10 years. It’s been her only job; she started there in the middle of her teens and has been there ever since. Since she first set foot there on a school trip, the owner, Archie, has taken her under his wing. Loveday, however, would prefer not to be under anyone’s wing, though she does enjoy working with Archie. Since a tragedy when she was 9, she lived in foster care, and the event that put her there made her someone her peers stared at and talked about. So she’s kept to herself, and she likes it that way.
Meeting Nathan Avebury upsets her carefully managed life. Despite herself, Loveday gets drawn into a relationship with him. And she’s happy. But she still holds important parts of herself back, like that childhood tragedy no one (she thinks) in York knows about.
The other change to her ordered life is the arrival at three different times of familiar books — ones she knows from her childhood. Are these just a coincidence, or has someone found out about her past, or has someone from her past surfaced? Loveday eventually is forced to talk about what she’d do anything to stay quiet about.
The Lost for Words Bookshop is a lovely book; it’s set in a bookshop and has a few quirky characters (Archie is one who’s impossible not to find entertaining), but it’s mostly about Loveday and her past, about heartbreaks and secrets and coming to terms with painful truths. Loveday has created a hard-to-crack shell around herself, and she has a few really wonderful people around her; as a reader, you just want her to give in already and let them in, to stop putting up walls. Just as the story slowly reveals the details about her life and difficult past, Loveday very slowly lets some parts of herself open up. But the last bit of shell is the toughest, and it’s the most painful for her to let fall away. That is when the story is the sweetest.
Rated: High. There are roughly 8 to 10 instances of strong language and more instances of milder language. There are a couple of “off-screen” sex scenes, and there are references to domestic abuse and a murder.
* I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
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