163. The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams

The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams. Mindy Thompson. 2021. [October 26] 272 pages. [Source: Library]

First sentence: The bookshop is feeling blue today. I sense it the moment my brother James and I arrive home from school. The lights are low, the ever-shifting wallpaper is a cheerless dark gray, with somber books on display--Wuthering Heights, Old Yellow, A Little Princess. The gloom sinks into my bones.

Premise/plot: The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams has an intriguing premise. It is set during the Second World War--1944 to be precise. But its main setting is a bookshop. Rhyme and Reason is one of a handful of magical bookshops. "Our shop isn't a normal bookshop, it belongs to the world of magic ones. Just like the others, Rhyme and Reason finds people from outside of our time and brings them to our door. It searches a hundred years into the future and the past to find customers who need the light and hope it can offer through books and community. Papa says bookshops are good for broken souls and wounded hearts." Poppy, our heroine, is quite a bookworm. She loves, loves, loves, loves her family's bookshop. She loves meeting all the customers--all ages of customers--from all time periods. But the shop has been acting weird, strange, out of sorts, unpredictable, moody. And Poppy feels called--in more ways than one--to try to mend the shop and set things right again. But that process is complicated. How does one *know* what the right thing to do is? There can be a subtle difference between something feeling right and being right. And sometimes doing what is right breaks your heart--shatters it. Still the fate of the bookshop may be in her hands--as incapable and unsure as she feels. 

My thoughts: This book had the potential to be super-fluffy and just pure delight OR the potential to be a weighty complex read. It was certainly heavier than I imagined it might be. The premise is pure delight: a MAGICAL bookshop. Customers coming into the shop from ALL time periods. Being able to read books from other time periods. Books finding the right reader at the right time. Books connecting people together. A true sense of community between readers--no divisions or divides. Pure delight. But it goes beyond that and ventures into more familiar territory perhaps--the battle between good and evil, light and dark. The magic that makes the bookshop possible is more complex than you might think. Magic comes with a price--in the words of Rumpelstiltskin from ONCE Upon A Time. There is a showdown between light and dark in The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams. And the book has more layers than you might expect. I found myself accurately predicting a few things, but it held some twists and turns that I did not guess, would never have guessed.

© 2021 Becky Laney of Young Readers