Wren
‘It’s a bookshop, it’s a coffee shop, and it’s a peddler of miracles.’
This book looked so cozy and life-affirming from the cover and blurb alone, I was completely blindsided and totally forgot to check trigger warnings. Which, btw, include grief (so much grief), death of a parent, dementia, and terminal illness. Come to think of it, looking back at my other experiences with Japanese fiction of this type, I should have expected something of that nature and come prepared. But look at that cover! So cozy! So life-affirming! Sigh.
Anyway, the book follows a pattern that’s fairly common for its ilk: it’s almost an anthology, in the sense that we get a collection of separate stories about people facing various hardships, and then they end up in a magical place where a magical being and her cat give them a magical healing experience, complete with some fairly simplistic wisdoms that are easy to understand in theory, but much harder to start applying to your life without years of therapy. The magic, however, helps everyone skip those years of therapy and embrace as much hope as they can get in their respective situations.
I hesitated a lot about the number of stars I wanted to give this book, because I actually liked the individual parts. The specific stories were fairly poignant and touching. The dementia one especially moved me. And the parts focused around the bookshop and its magic were, for the most part, really sweet and gentle, and they sort of soothed me after all the angst that came before them. But the stories about humans problems and the interludes with the supernatural solutions, while individually compelling, never quite meshed in a coherent, cohesive whole for me.
Might be a me problem, to be fair.
‘It’s a bookshop, it’s a coffee shop, and it’s a peddler of miracles.’
This book looked so cozy and life-affirming from the cover and blurb alone, I was completely blindsided and totally forgot to check trigger warnings. Which, btw, include grief (so much grief), death of a parent, dementia, and terminal illness. Come to think of it, looking back at my other experiences with Japanese fiction of this type, I should have expected something of that nature and come prepared. But look at that cover! So cozy! So life-affirming! Sigh.
Anyway, the book follows a pattern that’s fairly common for its ilk: it’s almost an anthology, in the sense that we get a collection of separate stories about people facing various hardships, and then they end up in a magical place where a magical being and her cat give them a magical healing experience, complete with some fairly simplistic wisdoms that are easy to understand in theory, but much harder to start applying to your life without years of therapy. The magic, however, helps everyone skip those years of therapy and embrace as much hope as they can get in their respective situations.
I hesitated a lot about the number of stars I wanted to give this book, because I actually liked the individual parts. The specific stories were fairly poignant and touching. The dementia one especially moved me. And the parts focused around the bookshop and its magic were, for the most part, really sweet and gentle, and they sort of soothed me after all the angst that came before them. But the stories about humans problems and the interludes with the supernatural solutions, while individually compelling, never quite meshed in a coherent, cohesive whole for me.
Might be a me problem, to be fair.