Jules Capelthorne is summoned to her home in the seaside town of Portneath when her beloved great-aunt Flo takes a fall. Since she has lost her job in a London publishing house, she decides to stay on to help her aunt heal and to lend a hand in Capelthorne Books, a venerable institution in the town. Much to her chagrin, though, she discovers that there’s a new competitor in town, with an old nemesis at its helm: Portneath Books has opened across the street, funded by the rival Montbeau family and owned by the handsome, charming, and oh-so-wrong Roman, Jules’ formerly unachievable school crush.
The Battle of the Bookshops is a charming and relatively low-angst romance that explores family rivalries, some interesting aspects of the book selling business, and the history of the 17th century witchcraft trials. The first third of the book is all about longing gazes between the rival booksellers, and Jules coming to terms with the class conflict at the heart of Portneath: the Montbeaus own much of the valuable property, and the Capelthorne’s nurse a resentful wound from a gambling incident between the two families more than a century ago. The discovery of an old handwritten manuscript in Capelthorne Books’ antiquarian section, written by a Capelthorne ancestor, adds a nice dash of historical intrigue, and the book takes an enjoyable detour into the history of witchcraft and the operations of a rare books auction.
That the angst is so low, though, makes the book drag a bit. Jules and Roman have a falling out over the future of Capelthorne Books — the Montbeaus own the building where Aunt Flo’s shop is housed, and the terms of the hundred year lease are about to be redrawn to the bookshop’s detriment — and we get a few chapters of simmering anger and unrequited yearning before disaster draws the lovers together again. I expected another crisis — the dreaded “third act breakup” — but instead, the last third of the book is focused on tying up all the loose ends into a cheerful package. This isn’t necessarily a fault — I’ve been trained by the genre to expect certain things, but that doesn’t mean a book needs to deliver them — but it did make the book a bit less of a page-turner.
All in all, though, I really enjoyed The Battle of the Bookshops: Poppy Alexander’s writing is top notch, the characters are all interesting without being annoyingly quirky, and the subplot of the grimoire rescued from historical obscurity was fascinating. I see that Alexander has some more books set in Portneath with the same cast of characters, and I expect I’ll be dipping into those to scratch the itch left behind by B.K. Borison’s Lovelight Farms series.
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