I haven’t given a three star rating to a book in a bit. I wanted to like this book a lot more than I ended up liking it. I absolutely loved Zevin’s newer title, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” (see my review of that on Goodreads).

The story was cute and touching, and the first half was very enjoyable. The second half felt like Zevin realized she didn’t want to exceed a certain page count and decided to shove a whole lot of action into the fewest pages possible.

There were some fleeting passages or singular sentences that stood out, but overall the story felt like it was powered more by just the expectation of meet-cute, feel-good emotions rather than an interesting or unique plot. Even the parts that were somewhat unexpected came up short in how they were fleshed out, and I put it down ultimately disappointed.

I love the bookstore aesthetic, but the characters were all very one-dimensional, and when they did have more depth it was only in a tacky subvert-expectations quirky way (like the town policeman who actually enjoys reading).

One thing I did enjoy was Fikry’s notes or summaries of classic books or stories that begin some of the chapters. It was a neat technique, but, unfortunately for Zevin, the summaries sometimes left me wishing I was reading those stories instead of this one.