Shauna Robinson's love of books led her to try a career in publishing before deciding she'd rather write books instead. Originally from San Diego, she now lives in Virginia with her husband and their sleepy greyhound. Shauna is an introvert at heart—she spends most of her time reading, baking, and figuring out the politest way to avoid social interaction. Must Love Books is her debut novel. You can find more of my reviews of Shauna's work here.
When Maggie Banks arrives in Bell River to run her best friend's struggling bookstore, she expects to sell bestsellers to her small-town clientele. But running a bookstore in a town with a famously bookish history isn't easy. Bell River's literary society insists on keeping the bookstore stuck in the past, and Maggie is banned from selling anything written this century. So when a series of mishaps suddenly tip the bookstore toward ruin, Maggie will have to get creative to keep the shop afloat. And in Maggie's world, book rules are made to be broken. To help save the store, Maggie starts an underground book club, running a series of events celebrating the books readers actually love. But keeping the club quiet, selling forbidden books, and dodging the literary society is nearly impossible. Especially when Maggie unearths a town secret that could upend everything. Maggie will have to decide what's more important: the books that formed a small town's history or the stories poised to change it all.
The premise and execution of this book is incredible: a woman, a little aimless, finds herself running a bookstore in her best friend's stead (despite actually not loving reading books), and ends up running a secret society out of the bookstore to thwart the closed-mindedness of the town. Sign me up! Robinson absolutely delivers on this premise, too. I really bought into the cult-like nature of the town, and was invested in Maggie's ability to keep things under wraps, not just from Ralph, the Bell Society's leader, but also from her best friend and the man she just started dating. In scenes where things got dicey, I found myself keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that everything went off without a hitch—but would there be hijinks without hitches? Robinson writes these moments of anxiety and the subsequent fallouts incredibly well, making for an engaging, fast-paced read.
Maggie is a character I feel like a lot of people might relate to, in more ways than one. She's confused about where she wants to go in life and feels lost by the rules she doesn't think she's following (and doesn't even want to follow in the first place). Maggie doesn't know it, but she knows more than she thinks she does. Her character and the book's themes are closely intertwined. The book has a really clear main theme, with a lot of other smaller ones feeding into it. The main one is that life is organized around an arbitrary set of rules, and you don't have to follow them to be successful: just do what makes you happy, and everything will fall into place at your own pace. Some smaller themes are like, how you can always start a new path for yourself, and how to stand up for yourself when you believe something is wrong, and so much more. I found that all the themes directly related to Maggie's character, and some other supporting characters, making for a read that was both inspiring and relatable.
Okay, let's talk about those books! I absolutely adore what Robinson is saying about literary books and classic versus speculative and genre fiction. There has been, for so long, this hype around classics and literary books that often stifles people's ability to find things that they actually want to be reading! Robinson dives into the complexity of this issue, from talking about why people actually love the classics, all the way to how speculative and genre fiction is treated in literary spaces. Maggie's big mission with her secret society isn't just to thwart the leader of the Bell Society, but also to bring people together over the books they actually love. I feel so passionately about this narrative, and love that Robinson chose to highlight it in her novel. I can't wait to share with everyone that Robinson wrote one of the literary world's biggest issues into print, and to give them the order to check it out! (Also have to say, I am a huge fan of the mention of Carmen Maria Machado, and the potential allusion to Jasmine Guillory's The Wedding Date, which is the book that got me into romance!)
I do hope that Shauna keeps writing, because her characters really resonate with me, and the bookishness that surrounds her plot lines keeps pulling me in. But honestly, no matter what she writes, I would read it—it's just that good! Until then, you can find more of my reviews of Shauna's work here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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