She does not even, to me, seem to be that big of a book lover. She also has little fight in her. The town is narrow-minded and bigoted, which can be interesting in itself and loan a decent story, but here it just felt pointless.
There's nothing going for the book. I wasn't interested in the story despite trying with best efforts, the end was a let down, the beginning slow, the middle without direction.
There is no climax either. It's seriously just 'suddenly there'. There's really no point to the novel - it's not even a book about failed dreams or anything really, or life lessons learned, it's just a depressing turnout that's not fair and not fair to read about. Even the assistant who the heroine cares for She seems rude and distasteful to me. The only thing I did enjoy was the small section for Lolita with the display and letters written back and forth about it.
Cute stuff. Obviously this isn't a book I can recommend. I wish it was, though, I usually dig bookstore and library settings. View all 44 comments. Shelves: non-ya , eh , literary-fiction , clear-ur-sh-t , owned , historical , reviewed , 3-stars.
If you believe that people are fundamentally somewhat selfish and unkind, this is the book for you. Bonus points for book representation.
I don't really think that, because if I did I would be forced to give into a lifetime of sorrow and cynicism and suffering and other alliterative negativity, but I do think a lot of people are. And I do hate capitalism. And I do like books. So this wasn't bad. Add to it the fact that I've had exercise routines longer than this book which may not sound insane, but c If you believe that people are fundamentally somewhat selfish and unkind, this is the book for you.
Add to it the fact that I've had exercise routines longer than this book which may not sound insane, but consider that working out is, for me, an undertaking I embark on approximately once every three years and get sick of nearly immediately and you'll get it , and there's a lot to like.
Not enough to make this a truly pleasurable reading experience. But a good amount. Bottom line: Apparently not every book about a bookstore is destined to be my favorite thing ever! Who knew. View all 16 comments. Reading this in conjunction with other nominees for the Booker Prize, like Jane Gardam's God on the Rocks and Kingsley Amis's Jake's Thing , really does give you this impression of 70s England as a place of small towns, insular gossip, hostility to new ideas, and a preoccupation with quotidian concerns over any sense of the wider world.
In a sense, fair enough — but one does slightly yearn for a little more ambition and pizzazz in the novelling world. By comparison, Iris Murdoch's The Sea, T Reading this in conjunction with other nominees for the Booker Prize, like Jane Gardam's God on the Rocks and Kingsley Amis's Jake's Thing , really does give you this impression of 70s England as a place of small towns, insular gossip, hostility to new ideas, and a preoccupation with quotidian concerns over any sense of the wider world.
By comparison, Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea , which I didn't entirely love when I read it years ago, seems like a worthy winner; it took those parochial English elements and made them into something archetypal, something mythic and strange and genuinely literary. That said, there is loads to like about most of the choices and this brief study in disillusion and small-town rivalries is no exception.
Fitzgerald teeters on the edge of tweeness but her writing is unsentimental enough and her characters believable enough to cope with it. My favourite moments came in the unexpected flashes of local landscape and custom — the marshman filing a horse's teeth, the uninhabited housing development slowly falling off the cliffs, the matter-of-fact Suffolk poltergeist inhabiting the bookshop.
I was left impressed with Fitzgerald's steely refusal to sugar-coat her narrative's decline and fall — even if, for me, it was hard not to wish she'd found a way to sublimate it all into something a bit more transcendent at the end. But Britain in was clearly about as untranscendent as you can get. View all 38 comments. May 21, Violet wells rated it liked it. My third Fitzgerald and least favourite. Essentially, it's about the power struggle between two women.
Florence is another of Fitzgerald's innocents, doomed to failure. A kind of child woman with a good heart but so lacking in practical acumen that opening a bookshop in a sleepy backward seaside village seems more like a wilful act of self-harm than an act of aspiration. Especially as we're never led to believe Florence has any kind of close affinity with books.
She does battle with the power br My third Fitzgerald and least favourite. She does battle with the power broker Mrs Gamart who wants the property for her own purposes. For me it lacked the subtlety of the other two as if Fitzgerald was fed up with being poor and wanted to earn some money.
It's a book that's tailor made for one of those charming period Sunday evening BBC dramas. The characters here are drawn with a more heavy-handed brush. They are more obviously plot devices than living people. Most crudely personified in Milo, the sophisticated nephew of the novel's villain who works at the BBC but ends up replacing the ten year old Christine as Florence's shop assistant.
He does what the plot tells him to do, however unlikely. The plot is also dependent on its central character's almost preposterous naivety. Suspension of disbelief became increasingly difficult to allow for the plot's implausible pivots, never more evident than when she hires Milo as an assistant paying him a pittance or when she's so quick to believe her most staunch supporter has ultimately betrayed her.
The comedy too can be slapstick, like the series of wish-fulfilment letters Florence writes to her pig-headed solicitor.
They are funny but I struggled to believe Florence would write them, another instance of the author bullying her characters into acting out of character for the plot. That said, there are lots of fabulous set pieces- the anarchy that ensues when Nabokov's Lolita arrives and the poltergeist with whom Florence shares the premises - and some very good writing. Essentially, it's the one dimensional nature of the characters that lets it down. View all 27 comments.
Mar 28, Barbara rated it it was amazing. As a child I often said to my mother: "That's not fair! Florence Green, the main character in The Bookshop, would certainly agree. Florence tried to expand the minds of the inhabitants of Hardborough without success.
The ethos of this village just wasn't buying it. Due to ignorance, cruelty or apathy, the people let Florence know that what she wanted for them was not what they wanted, certainly not Nabokov's controversial Lolita. I loved this story and As a child I often said to my mother: "That's not fair! I loved this story and Fitzgerald's style. What some have described as sad was, for me, an enjoyable and realistic story about human nature, power, politics, jealousy, and indifference.
I admired Florence's determination and spunk. She ignored Violet's subtle and not so subtle warnings. She called her wimpy solicitor a coward. Not so admirable was Violet's malevolent determination. I loved Christine and Mr. Brundish and their relationship with Florence. Too bad she didn't know that Brundish supported her to the bitter end. I think Florence will not be deterred.
Perhaps after a successful enterprise in her future she will send these words back to Hardborough. Oh no, not I, I will survive. Some random quotes that I just really loved- She drank some of the champagne, and the smaller worries of the day seemed to stream upwards as tiny pinpricks through the golden mouthfuls and to break harmlessly and vanish. His fluid personality tested and stole into the weak places of others until it found it could settle down to its own advantage.
But the Old House Bookshop, like a patient whose crisis is over, but who cannot regain strength, showed less encouraging returns. A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit , embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity. View all 26 comments. I feel at a loss about this book.
I finished it three days ago, and my thoughts about this little Booker-nominated novel still haven't settled in a definitive manner. They haven't settled at all. Did I like it? I don't usually have difficulty answering that question. Of course, there were things I liked about it. I liked that the protagonist, Florence Green, wanted to spend her widowhood running a bookshop. I liked that she was spunky and stood up to Mrs. Gamart, who wanted her to abandon th I feel at a loss about this book.
Gamart, who wanted her to abandon the idea. I liked the strange, unfriendly atmosphere of the small town of Hardborough. I liked the lack of sentimentality with which this was written, which kept it from being too cutesy. Some things about it, though, I didn't really like. The main thing, one that I can put my finger on, is that we never really know Florence Green.
The book is written from quite a remove, almost like that of a fairy tale, one that includes ghosts or "rappers" as they are called here. We don't really know why she wants to run a bookshop. She doesn't read and doesn't know good books and has to ask someone whether they think it would be a good idea to stock Vladimir Nabokov's new novel Lolita in her store. So, this woman who is sort of wide-eyed and carried along by a tide, who doesn't love books particularly, opens a book shop and is met with s English small-mindedness.
Should I care? The weird thing is that I did care. I was thrilled when people lined up to buy the Nabokov book. I cheered when Florence found a champion in Mr. My heart sank as the ending approached, that rather brutal ending. Would I have liked it better if the author had allowed us a little bit of happily-ever-after at the end, I wonder?
Or would I have found it twee, and complained of the sweetness? I suspect that this a is a no-win situation for me and Penelope Fitzgerald.
No-lose, too. I'm sitting here, right in the middle of the road. What an unhelpful review! View all 46 comments. If your library participates in Kanopy's free streaming service, the film is available there. The Publisher Says : In Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough.
My Review : Florence Green is my current idol of Resistance. She has lived quietly and unassumingly in Hardborough, a small East Anglian seaside town, and realized that her life was simply passing and not being lived. So she took her small inheritance and opened a bookshop. A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity. Of course, she takes out a loan against the freehold of her premises to start the business.
The sums are risible by today's standards, since this is , but they seem enormous to Mrs Green. This being , a certain degree of wincing at this self-deprecating, or merely invisibly sexist, humor is to be granted; but Fitzgerald wrote the novel in or thereabouts, as it was first published in Was this mildly misogynistic sally meant to be read with a raised eyebrow, or was she simply oblivious to its sexism?
I don't know, but I'm guessing it wasn't ironic based on the tone of the tale. It's very funny either way. Life as a business proprietor is not stress-free. Mrs Green is a busy, busy woman. Many are the factors she is required to balance in her running of the business.
Yet summer comes but once a year, and after all what good is living in a seaside village if the sea is invisible? She ought to go down to the beach. It was Thursday, early closing, and it seemed ungrateful to live so close to the sea and never look at it for weeks on end.
It's always seemed odd to me how many people I know here in my own seaside city who simply don't pay the slightest attention to the ocean that surrounds us! Mrs Green has failed to do one crucial thing in opening her shop: Get the town's Great and Good on side. In fact, when she is invited to the local county set's meeting place, she receives a very simple and direct order to cease and desist her plans to open her shop in the Old House, which it transpires the local grande dame wishes to put to another use.
To everyone's blank surprise, she does not back down. The invisible battle lines are drawn: She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out.
The battles go in Mrs Green's favor The quality do not like being told no. But the battles are waged fully! Mrs Green is not one to lie down and say die! The tests are, in the end, simply more than Mrs Green has the resources to withstand.
The state gets involved. The lawyers and the banks are not on her side. The town isn't willing to pull themselves out of the primordial muck of How Things Are Done to rally to her aid. It was defeat, but defeat is less unwelcome when you are tired. And yet Florence Green stood tall until the last moment, only leaving Hardborough when her very last farthing is needed to buy her way out of the morass that her impertinent refusal to bow before the quality has landed her in.
For that reason, I recommend this book for your hating, Resistance fighting, Yule giftee. It will give them a rock to stand on. View all 19 comments. A small village, Hardborough, hardly surviving the harsh salted air and erosion of the ocean, becomes the choice for a new book shop to be opened by a widow, Florence Green.
By all intentions, in , it could have been an asset to the town, but it is soon obvious that Mrs. Green overstepped social boundaries by buying a building that Mrs. Besides this unforgivable faut pas , Mrs. Green also unknowingly interferes with the soc A small village, Hardborough, hardly surviving the harsh salted air and erosion of the ocean, becomes the choice for a new book shop to be opened by a widow, Florence Green.
Green also unknowingly interferes with the social leadership of the formidable arts doyenne, Mrs. Two camps are slowly surfacing and dubious intentions become the name of the game. The kindhearted widow, Mrs. Green, does not understand the forces at work against her. Evil and greed do not make friends, neither do they embrace mercy or kindness. Politics is not for the soft-hearted. Small town politics are seldom for sissies. It is a weird book, since the ending is unexpected.
The author has this unbelievable eye for detail that constantly blew me away. The reality of the ending is fitting, although I was hoping for something more 'acceptable'.
I so wanted her, Mrs. Green, to live happily ever after. Alas, novels do not always end in fairy tales, and this is one of them. I think this ending reminds me too much of our own realities which we so often want to escape.
For sure. An excellent writer. I think the ending de-starred this book, since the prose was really outstanding. With another ending this book would not have become an award winner.
I do believe that the ambiance of the book was to confront and question our own morals and approaches to life and living and the people around us. What can we be really proud of in our relationships with other people.
Where do we fit in, in this small village issues? How honest are we? We recognize ourselves in this book and find it hard to admit our own roles, hence our aversion to the ending. A Rorschach test of reality we do not want to admit or face. So yes, it was good and it was bad. It was the truth as we know it. It was us. It is us. View all 12 comments. Sometimes a book ends in such a depressing way that I struggle to recall what went before. This is one of those books. It makes it difficult to write a balanced review but I will try.
I did enjoy most of the book. The author writes really well and there are many light moments where she exposes the truth of human nature. The dialogue is skilfully done and the main character,Florence Green, always seems to be in charge of the situation. She is portrayed as an intelligent, brave and resourceful woma Sometimes a book ends in such a depressing way that I struggle to recall what went before.
She is portrayed as an intelligent, brave and resourceful woman and there is a lot of enjoyment in the way she takes on the oppositional townspeople. This makes it all the more surprising when, right at the end of the book, things take an unexpected turn. It is a realistic ending and one which probably helped get the book listed for an award.
Sadly for me it was not my kind of an ending. View all 8 comments. Now reading a couple of her earlier ones, like this and At Freddie's I think Fitzgerald as a writer reached her peak quite late, or maybe didn't even reach it before her death. If The Bookshop is your introduction to Fitzgerald you have a treat before you, but for me, coming to it by the worst route, good though it is, I have the feeling that it could have been better. Above all this book could have been shorter. Take those two scenes, slap on a bit of context and you can reduce the story to fifteen pages- it could have been a short story.
Perhaps this is simply a matter of perspective as I sit and think, Fitzgerald's novels can be very easily boiled down to not much at all, indeed she summarised this one as 'a short book with a sad ending' - which as it happens sums up most of Fitzgerald's books.
Fitzgerald goes beyond parody in establishing her setting - the fictional Hardborough on the Suffolk coast, Suffolk is pretty isolated by English standards meaning a long way from London as a person travels the railway has abandoned the town, and the bridge has collapsed - there is a ferry boat - but the timetable is kept only on the far bank away from the town, the town faces the North sea, there are fishing boats but the fishmonger in town is a failing business view spoiler [ maybe because Asterix style he orders his fish in from London view spoiler [ by rail hide spoiler ] hide spoiler ].
The town is a borough, but hardly a hard one, the houses are damp, the cellars might be still filled with seawater from the last flood, and the fields are marshy, the cows stand in mist up to their udders the whole morning only to vanish back into it by the evening.
It is a liminal place, at the end of the earth. But this is universal, everywhere has it's own back of beyond, it's region famous for inbreeding, laughed at as a good century behind the times, so while ultra insular, it was a Spanish director, Isabel Coixet, who turned this book into a Film.
Into this setting Fitzgerald sets two incomers - Mrs Gamart who is set on dominating the town and transforming it into a rival to the non-fictional Aldborough, and the widow Florence Green, who decides to open a bookshop.
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