Either C.S. Lewis or William Nicholson said, “We read to know we are not alone.” Readers who read a lot can’t help but sometimes see our selves, our friends and family, our experiences, and our lives in the books we read. This is especially true of Miranda Brooks, the protagonist of Amy Meyerson’s affectingly bookish, The Bookshop of Yesterdays. After learning that her estranged uncle has died and left her his bookstore, Miranda returns to Los Angeles. The funeral is hardly over when she discovers that Uncle Billy has left her one last scavenger hunt, one that will finally reveal the big family secrets that no one would ever talk about.
Sixteen years after she last spoke to Billy, Miranda is a successful middle school history teacher in Philadelphia. She has a boyfriend. They live together. Things are good. But then she gets word that her uncle has died. Despite the estrangement—and her mother’s continued hostility towards Billy—Miranda flies back for the funeral. She doesn’t plan to stay long, even after she learns that she’s inherited Billy’s beloved Prospero Books. But then she receives the first clue in the scavenger hunt and she starts to put off her return. She has to know what happened to Billy and her mother. And she also can’t bring herself to sell the bookstore. While she follows the clues Billy left, she dives into a possibly quixotic quest to save Prospero Books.
The Bookshop of Yesterdays, in addition to the literary scavenger hunt and the bookstore subplot, does something that I love. At the beginning of the book, I was set up to feel very specific things about some of the characters. Miranda’s mother is portrayed as simultaneously cold and overprotective. Billy is the magical relative who made Miranda’s childhood wonderful. Miranda herself is a seeker who just wants to know why her mother fought with her uncle before he vanished from their lives. The scavenger hunt—in which quotes lead to books with clues—results in Miranda (and us) getting the story in small doses. We and the protagonist are constantly reevaluating what we know about everything.
The way that books function in The Bookshop of Yesterdays strongly reminded me of one of my favorite books, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin. Readers who’ve been trying to find something like it should definitely pick up this novel. The longer I read, the more I enjoyed this book. At the very end, as Miranda heads off into a brave new world, I was cheering for her and the possibilities of her future. For a book that has so many emotional family stories, it ends with a surprisingly beautiful hopefulness.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration. It will be released 12 June 2018.
Notes for bibliotherapeutic use: Recommended to mothers and daughters who are on the outs but want to reconcile.