![]() ![]() (It’s a Dear John letter, or I guess a Cher Jean letter.) This revelation causes him to unmoor his barge and go on a trip to the south of France with an equally-suffering customer, Max Jordan, so the two of them can try to heal their pain and find out what truly happened in the past so they can live in the Now (capitalized, I swear it.) Suddenly, new light falls on the situation when his new and beautiful neighbor Catherine finds an unopened letter from _ in his kitchen table drawer. But… he cannot heal his own terrible pain, left over from when his lover (whom he thinks of only as “_”) left him twenty years ago. From this barge, he dispenses literary prescriptions for the malaises his customers bring him, something he can do because he is extremely sensitive and empathic. ![]() ![]() The premise of Nina George’s novel is that the (heavily-named) Jean Perdu owns a bookshop on a barge in Paris, called the Literary Apothecary. The hours I spent reading it are hours I spent withering away, whispering “Oh God, oh God” to myself.) (Before you ask, I finished it because I felt I had to: I was reading it for a book club in which we don’t just socialize, we spend two hours analyzing the book itself. Manipulative, saccharine, ghastly, embarrassing. What could be so awful? Instead, it is the worst book I’ve read in years. It looks on the surface (and I do mean the surface, as in the cover) as if it’s going to be a nice book: it’s about a bookseller in Paris, and it’s clearly a romance. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |