The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

“For as long as she could remember, she had thought that autumn air went well with books, that the two both somehow belonged with blankets, comfortable armchairs, and big cups of coffee or tea.”

I truly wanted to like this, after all what could be more delightful than a book about a book lover and her books? Nonetheless this was dull and dry. The characters are lacklusters, the plot was a very basic rom-com script and the town was nowhere near as charming as the author intended it to be.

Sometimes I go into reading a book with such big hopes and yet the book can miss when it comes to plot, miss when it comes to characters, and miss when it comes to believability.

That is true of Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend.

The plot is farfetched: a Swedish woman comes to America to finally meet her pen pal only to learn her friend has died. Instead of returning home, the woman decides to open up a bookstore in her friend's dying Midwestern town.

The characters are farfetched; romance between an incredibly shy foreigner and an incredibly shy American man seems impossibly unlikely.

I usually give up on a book that isn't working for me. I kept turning pages with this book and read all the way to the end. I don't recommend it, but I must admit that something in me loves the idea of a story in which a dying town is revitalized by a bookstore.