The Echo of Old Books

This book was clearly written by a book lover, about a book lover, for book lovers.

???There is nothing quite so alive as a book that has been well loved.???

???Books have feelings???? ???Books are feelings,??? he replied simply. ???They exist to make us feel. To connect us to what???s inside, sometimes to things we don???t even know are there.???

Ashlyn Greer is a bookshop owner with the ability to touch a book and feel the echoes of its past owners. She comes across two beautiful books with no listed authors, both aching with feelings of love, loss, and betrayal. One titled ???Regretting Belle??? and the other ???Forever, and Other Lies???, the two volumes appear to tell the story of the same doomed love affair from two different perspectives. We read the two volumes along with Ashlyn, weaving back and forth between the past in 1941 and Ashlyn???s present in 1984 as she tries to identify the unnamed authors and discover what happened to them. And in the process, finds her own path to healing.

Oh, I loved this book so much. A literary mystery to solve, a cozy bookstore/bindery, romance and heartbreak. What???s not to love? I???m a sucker for books that do parallel timelines well, and this one does it well. We get a forbidden romance between people of different social classes, hidden family secrets, betrayal and redemption. This book felt like a delight to me, and I didn???t want to put it down until it was finally finished. Ashlyn is consumed with finding out what happened to the mysterious authors, and so was I!

If you like parallel timelines, historical romances, and unreliable narrators, I think you should pick this up!