Flippin' Brilliant

The title of this post does not refer to the stack of pancakes I shall be eating later, for of course Shrove Tuesday is my celebration of choice for today, but instead it is in reference to my latest read How to Find Love in a Bookshop.

Being half term I have some time off this week and this afternoon I needed to be home for S. 
As so often happens she made plans to go out with friend so I was at a loose end.
I should have cracked on with the household chores but the lure of my book was too strong, I needed to know how it ended.
So I sat down and read for 2 hours.

It had me hooked from the start.
Just a few short pages into the story and I was crying. 
Emilia is sat with her father as he is dying. It bought back that time in my life when I had to cope with the loss of my dad.
Maybe because it would have been his 78th birthday soon and so emotions are always a little more heightened around these times, but also because she writes with such a warmth of feeling.
Her descriptions of food are marvelous and with just the right combination of words she paints a vivid picture of the world where the story is set and the people who inhabit it too.
It's a romantic tale of people finding what (and who) they need through the bookshop in one way or another.

In one passage Emilia is just locking up the shop on Christmas Eve.....
'Emilia put on her coat, shut the door and turned the key. She thought of all the books they had sold, and imagined them being opened the next morning, and people being transported as they sat on the floor surrounded by wrapping paper, or curled up on a sofa with a glass of champagne, or sitting by the fire while the chestnuts roasted.

I love those sentences. The images they conjure up and the essence of the anticipation of new books at Christmastime. I always have a new pile of books for Christmas and look forward and enjoy that quiet time on Christmas afternoon when you get to peruse them properly. 

This book would make a great present, for yourself or someone else. I did promise myself a while ago that once I have read a book it will go to the charity shop as our shelves were groaning, but I really don't want to let this one go as I can see me dipping into this again.