I polled YouTube and you voted. The next book to cross the opening of Voidy is The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods. This was part of that book haul I picked up in January. I found it on the table labeled “BookTok”. My keen interest in tackling the popular prevailed and I added it to the stack. I’ve got to say, I can see why it is popular even if it ultimately isn’t for me. But will it end up in the dark innards of Voidy? And who is Madame Bowden?
Summary
Opaline is a young woman in the early 1900s trying to escape the heavy hand of her brother. She travels to France to avoid a marriage to a stranger. While in Paris, she enters circles of famous authors and book collectors. When her brother arrives, she flees to Ireland with the aid of James Joyce.
In Ireland, her contact has passed away and his nephew offers her lodging and work in the curiosity shop his uncle used to run. While expanding the business into rare books and investigating the Bronte family, she finds a missing manuscript from Emily Bronte.
Around this time she conceives a child with a lover from France and is also captured by her brother, who sends her to an asylum. She remains there until she manages to escape by threatening to take her own life and end the payments coming from her brother. The doctor lets her go so long as she remains quiet and keeps her brother unaware of her escape.
She forms a relationship with an Austrian soldier who is a prisoner of war during WWII. After the war ends, he travels home until his father passes and comes back to be with Opaline. Around this time she meets with her brother, who is actually her father, and finds out her baby wasn’t stillborn but sold to a family. She returns to the bookshop hoping one day her daughter will find her.
Woven into the above story is a modern-day parallel that follows Martha and Henry. Martha is escaping an abusive marriage. She has run away and winds up working as a housekeeper for Madam Bowden. While living there, Henry is snooping around looking for an old bookshop that he believes has records of a novel that can make his career if he finds it. Unfortunately, the bookshop isn’t where it should be.
The two of them form a friendship and eventually a relationship. This forces Henry to end his engagement to another woman, which he does in person in London. While he is gone, his message doesn’t make it to Martha and she believes Henry is just a jerk trying to take advantage of her. This is also when Martha’s husband shows up. While physically attacking her, Madam Bowden confronts him, and “somehow” he ends up falling down stairs breaking his neck. Madam Bowden tells Martha she will handle it and has her go to the shops so she has an alibi.
When Henry returns, he has to work hard to regain Martha’s trust. They go to the asylum where Opaline was captive and retrieve the records. From those records and this mysterious manuscript Martha finds earlier in the novel, the two of them manage to put together that Opaline did find the Bronte manuscript and that it is the story Martha has slowly been inking onto her skin. The bookshop makes its appearance and Martha and Henry take over running it.
What Worked
First, the writing is solid. That always makes it easier to focus on the story-level construction instead of the grammar and word-to-word flow.
I also liked the magical realism of the novel. Martha can read people like books. It’s fuzzy magic and sometimes she can see the type of person someone is. Near the end, this magical ability turns into mind reading. The bookshop is magical since it appears for those who are lost and searching for something. And the Madam Bowden mystery is fun to think about. All of it fits just on the edge of realism and I like it.
Martha’s reactions to her abuse felt very real. From the women I have met who suffered in similar ways, they acted a lot like Martha in the early chapters of the book. The transition to an empowered woman is satisfying because of her prior abuse, though she comes across as more fictionalized than intended because of how dramatic her change is.
What Didn’t Work
There are some reveals I saw coming very early in the book. The two big ones are Opaline is related to Martha and the missing Bronte book is written on Martha’s skin. The missing Bronte book feels symbolically necessary since Henry is searching for it and thus Martha. But Martha and Opaline’s familial relationship feels less necessary to me. It would be more satisfying if they weren’t related.
What is gained by Martha and Opaline being related? Opaline is searching for her daughter which she finds out in the last few dozen pages or so wasn’t stillborn. That great-grandmother relationship between the characters ties up a storyline of the baby we suspect didn’t die in the asylum.
Is this necessary though? What if the baby did die? Opaline would still have gone to the bookshop. She would have had a relationship with the Austrian soldier and confronted her father/brother. The only thing gained is some connective tissue between the two women’s POVs, but they are strong enough storylines in their own right that I’m not sure we need them tied together. It sends the message Martha should care more about Opaline because she is family and not because of a shared history of abuse. These characters all come from abusive families/relationships. That should be enough to tie them together.
Who is Madame Bowden
Madame Bowden hires Martha from an ad in a paper. While Martha is working for her, there is a party where a group of women ask Martha how she fell in with Madam Bowden, but none of them see her at the party. Later, Martha’s husband is murdered by Madame Bowden, and Madame Bowden has his body tossed in the river. So people know of her and have interacted with her aside from Martha and Henry.
In the end, she disappears like a guardian angel with a job well done.
I think Madame Bowden represents the spirit of the bookshop. However, there could be some doubt about this. Martha says, “You never left at all, did you?” in the attic at the end. This can imply two different things. First, Madame Bowden doesn’t leave and is some kind of guardian angel. Second, Madame Bowden is some kind of spirit of the bookshop and the bookshop never left Ha’penny Lane. Because everything focuses on the bookshop and rare books, having Madame Bowden be a guardian angel seems less likely than the spirit of the bookshop.
In either case, Madame Bowden reflects the role of Sylvia Beach from Opaline’s storyline in Paris. From an archetype perspective, she is the guide for the young protagonist.
Verdict and Video
If I belonged to the target audience, I probably would have liked it. It’s a tidy novel with themes of rare book collecting and abusive relationships. There are strong themes of female empowerment, which I like. But the tidiness is predictable and works against a broader message of human connection outside familial relationships. So what’s the verdict?
Unfortunately, I am giving this to Voidy. There are two rules to Voidy: it can eat books I feel fail on a craft level, and it can eat books that aren’t for me. The Lost Bookshop mostly works on a craft level, but it just isn’t for me.
