Wednesday, March 2, 2016

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald, 394 pages

This is one of the BEST books I've read in a long time. It's like a love story to reading, a passion for books. Here's the blurb from the back, which doesn't do it justice.

Once you let a book into your life, the most unexpected things can happen....
Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her book-loving pen pal. When she arrives, however, she finds Amy's funeral guests just leaving. The residents of Broken Wheel are happy to look after their bewildered visitor-there's not much else to do in a dying small town that's almost beyond repair.
You certainly wouldn't open a bookstore. And definitely not with the tourist in charge. You'd need a vacant storefront (Main Street is full of them), books (Amy's house is full of them), and...customers.
The bookstore might be a little quirky. Then again, so is Sara. But Broken Wheel's own story might be more eccentric and surprising than she thought.
A heartwarming reminder of why we are book lovers, this is a sweet, smart story about how books find us, change us, and connect us.

This book had so many amazing lines. One of my favorites was "That night, Sara sat in Amy's library for hours, thinking about how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, and grieving for her, the woman she had never met." I was also shaken by the thought Sara had at one point of that maybe she wasn't the main character in her story, that instead of being Elizabeth Bennett she was Caroline Bingley. Again, this was an amazing book, one that will stick with me for a long time.

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