THE BOOKSHOP ON THE SHORE: the funny, feel-good, uplifting Sunday Times bestseller (Kirrinfief)

If you like her books you will enjoy this one as well . Liked the relationship build up with children. A light and sweet read

I love Jenny Colgan, and have devoured each of her books when they've come out. This one had passed me by so I thought I'd use lockdown to catch up. The main characters - Zoe and the children - are really well-drawn. Ramsay is just a cipher and I never felt he was given sufficient personality or characterisation to make me care about what happened to him in any way, and the chemistry between him and Zoe is non-existent. His most frequently-described characteristic is his large hands, which is not exactly helpful in being engaged in his fate. The main character and the four children are more rounded and interesting, but it's as if Jenny just didn't care enough about the others to do more than sketch. The really distracting - truly, 'drop you out of the story' distracting - thing, is the terrible editing. Several times the wrong character's name is used, which I appreciate is down to the copy editor, but quite frequently the same word is used multiple times in a sentence giving the impression that it was written several ways to see which worked and then none of the alternatives deleted, so it really doesn't make sense. Periodically it seems as if half a paragraph has been accidentally removed, and at quite crucial moments. On a number of other occasions it'll say something like 'she'd decided to avoid the direct approach as that was disastrous. And so she decided the only thing that would work was the direct approach'. It's just sloppy, and should have been picked up pre-printing - the overall impression is honestly that this book was rushed out without the usual polish that it would acquire during editing. It almost reads like a self-published novel that's been stuck online without the benefit of a professional sheen, and that's pretty inexcusable in a print edition from a best-selling author. Annoyingly, given its shortcomings, it has hints and flashes of being really good, and is a little darker than some of her other novels.If you can cope with well-drawn central characters and only cartoonish ciphers for everyone else, and the glaring inconsistencies in the text, you'll likely enjoy it overall, as I did - but boy are those grievances annoying!

Enjoyed this story. Easy and just what is needed during this weird time we are all in. I took off two stars because there were a few glaring errors due to a lack of good proofreading which were frustrating. We are not talking typos but character names that were changed! Someone obviously didn't bother too hard to check this. Otherwise a good read.

I loved this story, it sucked me in and held me fast. I hated having to put it down to do anything else, but that is what Jenny Colgan's books tend to do when I read them.Set in Scotland, in a remote village near Loch Ness, this is a wonderfully descriptive tale. Zoe is desperate to give her son, Hari a proper life and she is doing this by uprooting her life in a London bedsit to go up to Scotland to hep run a mobile book shop and look after three, very wild children.I loved Zoe from the beginning, I wanted to wrap her up an tell her everything would be fine. I wanted Hari to find his voice and the three other children to find happiness. This story just had the effect of making me want to be part of it.This story made me laugh at times, nearly cry at others and I didn't want it to end. Pick this book up asap, you won't regret it!

Zoe is a single mother struggling to support herself and her four year old son Hari in London. She is offered two jobs in the Scottish highlands - one is running a mobile bookshop while the owner, Nina, is having a baby. The other job is acting as au pair to the three unruly children of a single father who has a very large house but not much money or time, and whose children mostly run wild. And of course there is a stern, disapproving housekeeper - what Scottish story would be complete without one? The children don’t like Zoe and tell her she won’t last long - no prizes for guessing how that turns out. A fairly interesting if entirely predictable story. I enjoyed the parts about the bookshop most.

I was longing to return to Scotland after reading the first book in this series - which really left an impression on me. It was lovely to see Nina and Lennox living together and what happens after their happy ever after. The atmosphere of the big house is wonderful, du Maurieresque and the transformation it goes through under Zoe’s influence was lovely to read. The romance isn’t the central focus of this book, instead there’s a family drama and lots of healing to be done. But I loved Zoe’s story and her own HEA was lovely. Jenny is so consistently good. I have loved following her career and seeing her writing grow and change. There seemed to be less careful adherence to some of the stuffy writing rules we get shoved down our throats so much, and I especially loved all the head jumping - hearing multiple characters’ thoughts even in the same scene. Thank you for another smasher of a book that helped me escape the horrors of March 2020.