The Little Bookshop Of Lonely Hearts by Annie Darling

2.5 Stars

This is pretty much standard chick lit fare; unfortunately the ending is so flagged up in the first few chapters it becomes an exercise in how long it will take the characters to realise.  As you can imagine I found this somewhat frustrating and I did find it a bit of a chore to get to the end if I'm being honest.  This is a shame as the setting is charming and the characters themselves aren't actually too bad, the writing flowed well and gave a good insight in to the characters and the location.  What let the book down was the plotting, too much was given away far too soon - whilst we all know how a book of this genre is going to ultimately end it should be fun getting there.

The best thing for me was the setting.  It did give a severe case of the guilts though as I am a firm e-reader addict and this mean my support of bookshops has fallen drastically by the wayside.  Although I have to admit if Happy After After (shouldn't that have been HappILY After After by the by) really did exist I could see myself frequenting it.  Maybe not on a weekly basis but certainly every couple of months or so and NOT for the Regency Romance section thats for sure.

The main character of Posy is a little bit of a puzzling person who definitely seems to lack a backbone and I did wonder what the rather incredible sounding Lavinia saw in her.  Turns out Lavinia may have been right and I may have been wrong but I get the feeling I would have itched to slap Posy for her constant belittlement of herself and inability to stand up to Sebastian.  She is clearly strong as she has brought up her brother after her parents untimely death but she is such a milksop.

I would struggle to recommend this book to friends though unless I knew that they were big fans of the genre.  Even then it would come with caveats.  It isn't a bad book but it isn't a great exponent of what should be light breezy and fun to read.