The Last Bookshop in London by Madeline Martin

Title: The Last Bookshop in London
Author: Madeline Miller
Publication: Hanover Square Press, trade paperback, 2021
Genre: Historical Fiction
Setting: WWII London

Description: After her mother dies, Grace Bennett and her irrepressible friend, Viv, leave the country for 1939 London, accepting the offer of a rented room from Mrs. Weatherford, a friend of Grace’s mother. Viv quickly finds a job at Harrod’s but Mrs. Weatherford has to bully an acquaintance to hire Grace to work at Primrose Hill Books. The store is tired and dusty and Grace, not a reader, is dismayed by its appearance and its curmudgeonly owner, Mr. Evans. 1939 London is not the vibrant place Grace and Viv had dreamed of but a city preparing for war. However, as Grace is introduced to the love of reading and begins to make friends, she transforms the bookstore into a community gathering place that offers solace and solidarity as air raids and loss of life threaten the neighborhood and the entire city.

My Impression: On paper, this is an appealing story about books and bookstores so it was a surprise to discover a heroine who does not like to read:

Grace masked a twinge of disappointment. After all she knew very little about books. Any attempts at reading had been quashed by countless interruptions. She’d been far too busy at her uncle’s store, trying to earn enough money for her and her mother’s survival, to bother with reading. Then her mother had become ill . . .

I questioned the strength of Grace’s education if the only book she can remember is her mother’s copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales! Luckily for Grace, a handsome stranger comes into the bookstore in Chapter 3, who recommends The Count of Monte Cristo and nurtures Grace’s growing appreciation of books (and dreams of romance). As she cleans the bookshop, organizes the stock, and builds word of mouth to draw customers in, Grace’s goal is a letter of recommendation so she can work elsewhere but the power of books works its magic on her and by the time bombs start falling on London, Grace is reading aloud from Middlemarch to distract those sheltering from the Blitz at Farringdon Station and the bookshop has also become a gathering place; she no longer wants to leave.

It is hard to explain what I found annoying about this book besides its predictability. It may be partly that I found Grace a dull character and everything seemed to happen too easily for her, although she was a hard worker, working wonders on the bookshop and becoming an air raid warden (I was surprised to read that one in six wardens were women). Mostly, it seemed as if the author was trying too hard to jam every fact she knew about WWII into the story. In another context, Sue Sims described exactly what I was thinking:

[In] some historical fiction, the narrative is . . . overloaded with carefully researched detail intended to add verisimilitude to the setting (The Encyclopedia of Girls' School Stories, vol. 3).

I felt this book was much too crammed with the author’s research, which made it verge on pedantic. On the other hand, I did not find the anachronisms that often irritate me in historical fiction, so at least her research was thorough.   I wonder if I would read more of her books – there are so many WWII historical novels these days that it makes more sense to try new authors when possible.

When I was in London in June, I was frequently in the neighborhood of the Farringdon Station, which opened in 1863 yet is now shining new and elegant due to being a stop on the just-opened Elizabeth Line. The docent at the Docklands Museum was doing a presentation on the Blitz and London’s East End when I visited and I told her that the characters in this book were spending their nights in the Farrington tube station, one of several designated as civilian air raid shelter. She pointed out that these would have been extremely dirty due to the fuel used at the time, not to mention vermin and no porta-potties. Nor were the shelters guaranteed to be safe. There were significant casualties when one tube station received a direct hit. On the night of October 14, 1940, a bomb penetrated the road and exploded in Balham Underground station, killing 68 people. A bus traveling in black-out conditions then fell into the crater, which flooded when water mains broke. Some 400 people escaped but approximately 68 drowned before they could be rescued. Among the other interesting things she told me was that rabbits were not rationed so families bred and ate them because meat was scarce. I should tell the varmints eating my daylilies to watch out!

Source: Personal copy. This is my twentieth book in the 2022 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge led by Marg at The Intrepid Reader. I think my verdict is Good but nothing than transcends the crowded field of WWII historical fiction.  If you have read it, what do you think?