DNF at 53%

Many people think that you shouldn't post a review to a book you didn't finish, but if your leaving before a play ends shows your thoughts of a play, why wouldn't you leave before the end of a book you really don't like?!

So, if you like:
1. misleading titles
2. no plot
3. and horrible characters
this book might be the one for you. Sadly, none of the aforementioned is my thing.

Now, I like me a bad, nasty character, I really do. But bad characters are hard to write. You need to know how to balance and not make a reader sick before they finish a book. This is not that case.

The title and the cover of this book, even the description, suggest that this is a hilarious read. I mean, bookshops, cats, secret confessions - what's not to like here!?

First of, this is nothing bad sad and miserable.

Fawn, the main character, is this lonely, miserable person whose business is failing. A new bookshop opens in her neighborhood, and she does is lie, treat everyone around her poorly and try to get vengeance for who knows what.

I just can't even explain how frustrating of a character Fawn is!
The way she treats her family, employees, customers, fellow business owners. Everything is just sickening!

The book was written in the form of email correspondence, online comments and a little bit of journal entries. If it wasn't written like this, I highly doubt that I would have read this much.

Maybe the book itself isn't all that bad, but the advertising has to do a 180.

This book is laugh out loud funny in some parts and super sad in other parts. I absolutely loved the format of emails, journal entries, and web page correspondence. I loved this and it was written very well, some parts were a little drawn out or repetitive but overall a good story with good humor.
Fawn Birchill is the owner of her very own neighborhood book store, she also has a store cat named butterscotch and has taken on the feeding of numerous alley cats, the name of her bookstore is aptly named The Curious Cat Book Emporium. The book follows her journey through being the only neighborhood bookstore and somewhat thriving to becoming the second bookstore on the block and barely surviving. We find that fawn had a tough childhood working in her fathers store and see why she is very blunt and seems to complain a good bit, Fawn can be a bit ornery but is also generous and kind when she deems necessary.
This was a quick easy read and i thoroughly enjoyed all parts of the book,.

Thank you to the author, Lake Union Publishing and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I love most anything about bookshops, cats never hurt and I enjoy reading epistolary novels. This should have been completely my jam. Unfortunately, the blurb "uproariously funny" should read "deeply miserable and depressing". Fawn, the main character is a deluded, completely out-of-touch fantasist who is deeply irritating because her treatment of everyone else is so shabby. As you read, you realize a bit of how she became the way she is, but I found her almost impossible to like. Because I do like epistolary novels, it was a quick read, and the last 20 pages make an effort to show that she is capable of change. However, it's a case of too little too late, sadly.

Actual rating: 2.5

When it comes down to it, I think that the biggest problem with this book is with its marketing. The cover, title, and description had me expecting a funny story, possibly some romance, and a whole lot of book love. What I got was an epistolary novel about a lonely, vindictive woman and her failing business.

Unfortunately, that meant that this book wasn't what I was expecting (or hoping for), and wasn't something I would normally pick out for myself. That being said, it definitely had its moments. The side characters were definitely the highlight of this story - each of them had really strong and distinctive personalities, and a lot of my favorite moments were their responses and reactions to Fawn's antics. And, although I'm not generally a fan of epistolary writing, the format of this novel was relatively effective. I ended up with a very vivid picture of Fawn's life, even without any actual narrative writing.

In terms of unlikeable main characters, this book really takes the cake. Fawn is simply dreadful. She's selfish, rude, and a pathological liar, and I just could not bring myself to empathize with or relate to her. And, while she does get a redemption arc, I found it incredibly rushed and therefore not nearly as satisfying as it could have been. Her comments and actions could be amusing at times, but other times her callousness was downright difficult to read. After a while, I got the point that she wasn't a good person, and her continued lies and snide comments were just overkill.

I am a bookseller and have been for over 30 Years. This book was different. Some of it I liked and some I didn't. I actually liked other characters better than the main charterer. Fran Birchill got on my nerves in the first part of the book and I could seem to shake that after

I read quite a few of the bad reviews of this book before diving in and I have to say it isn’t nearly as bad as a lot of people have said. Yes, Fawn is a terrible person, but she’s sad and desperate, not malicious, and there’s clearly a darker side to her history with her father that influences how she acts around others. It’s not a hilarious laugh-out-loud novel, but it is quirkily funny, something like Bridget Jones or the Bob Servant books with its epistolary style. It’s way too long though, it could have been half the length it is.

This story was very cute but I could only read it in my Humanities professors voice as Fawn had the same personality. Witty and cute but did seem to be long winded..
I did find that it was lacking in some areas.

Though I did not finish the book, I felt it necessary to give feedback. First and foremost, I thought Fawn was a great character and had a lot of potential. Her dialogue was well written and at times witty, which I really enjoyed. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get into the story itself. I don’t mind the format of the book; I’ve actually read other books with a similar format and really liked them, so that did not deter my enjoyment of this book. However, at times I felt parts of the book didn’t flow well, and some parts felt very dry and unnecessary, as if they were just filler. I truly wish I would have found the story more intriguing, but it just didn’t grab my attention like I had hoped.

I loved the format of this book, It was written as a series of emails which was unique and easy to read. However I found the main character Fawn very hard to stay interested in. I love books about bookstores but this one didn't do it for me. The writing was well done, the author is definitely skilled. However, if I was shaving coffee with Fawn I would want to leave quickly and I felt the same way about this book. Thank you for the opportunity to read it. Sorry this one didn't work out but I will try this author again next time.

I don’t know if management characters just aren’t for me or if the main character was written to be so unlikeable that I did not want to finish the book. I don’t think that the main character redeemed herself, and I think that this would have translated better as a movie or a tv show.

Sorry, this was not for me. I hated the format and the main character is not relatable at all.
Very misleading from the cover and description. Thank you to netgalley for the ARC.

I absolutely loved it!!!!! Quick read and full of goodness on every page. Highly recommend this one.

I was thrilled to read this book because everyone loves a premise and atmospheric magic that a bookshop can bring but unfortunately, this story fell short to me. I found that Fawn, our main character, was a interesting character that could be developed throughout the whole book but she remained flat to me. I was invested in reading a story about a woman who could overcome her personal problems but that didn't happened at all. I felt like the story didn't evolved as I turned the pages.

My main issue with this book was that I didn't felt a pull right on the very beginning which usually motivates me to keep reading. If there were some sort of hook, maybe the story would be more structured. I see some potential and a lot of plot work to do.

There were many things that came out of reading this book. I would like to start with the format, primarily written as chains of emails from the protagonist, Fawn, to her coworkers, family members, friends, etc.. There are also sections that include Fawn's thoughts, written like a diary entry.. This layout makes the novel easy to read, in the sense that the pages turn rather quickly. Additionally, there is an element of Fawn's customers writing reviews on phillysmallbiz.com about the bookstore she owns. They discuss their experience at the bookshop and Fawn promptly responds to their thoughts.

This is where I found it difficult to relate to the book. I can understand having a protagonist with FEW redeeming qualities, but I honestly felt as though Fawn was entirely unrelatable. She hardly had anything nice to say to people, she never took suggestions from her employees, she neglected to respond to her families plea for her to visit her father, and she only responded positively to reviews that said something good about her store. Otherwise, there was a lot of degrading dialogue that I feel discredited individuals thoughts and opinions. This made it difficult to connect to the character and therefore the book at the beginning.

After pushing through this lull, I began to handle Fawn's personality better. Her character grew out of her negative bubble and by the end she was more personable and realistic. This made the book more enjoyable and relatable.

Overall, I think the organization of the book was unique, which captured my attention. There were no distinct chapters, making it difficult to decide when to stop, so I found myself continuously flipping through the pages. There were points when I was not sure if I wanted to keep reading, but I am glad I did because it is satisfying to see the protagonist develop her otherwise lack of redeeming qualities. Definitely stick through it and you'll find it ends on an uphill slope, I just wish that side of Fawn's personality had shown through earlier on.

I like epistolary novels and the premise was so interesting, but the book was tedious. I skimmed the second half thinking there must at least be development in the end, but I was disappointed there too. Also, the title and cover are misleading.

*ARC kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I tried really hard to like this book while the blurb and cover sounded really promising,I did not enjoy this book at all.

You know how sometimes you have to work to finish a book? This was one of those..... That's not to say the book was horrible, just kind of meh. At first Fawn (the main character who owns a bookstore) was pretty likable, cute, and quirky but as the book progressed she got not whiney, started lying more & more, and was just hard to like. The style of the book (emails, notes, etc) was a decent concept, it was pretty easy to follow along, I saw a few errors but maybe once final copy is released they will be taken care of. Overall, the story was ok, just really couldn't relate with main character at all. Thank you Netgalley for ARC.

When I began reading this book, I became hooked because I wanted to know if Fawn would break up with the fellow she was dating. Then I was wondering about the cosplay pen-pal relationship. Then I began to see the heaps and heaps of dishonesty in all of her correspondence. Her dramatic flair was amusing and kept me reading as she became shadier and shadier--and developed quite the habit of emailing while drunk (never a good idea!) I almost wrote her off as a 50-something antihero who was unwilling to change for the better.

A quote from an email from Fawn to her sister at the beginning of the book that I found was funny: "Can you believe it's been three months? Just last week, he took me out to dinner and paid for it himself! If this doesn't smell like commitment, then I don't know what does!"

What kept me going was: 1. I needed to know how the Mark Twain situation panned out and 2. the emails from Jane. I could see a glimmer of a better person lurking under all the dross* that was covering Fawn.

As a reader you really think you know where this is going to go in the beginning, it sounds as if there might be some sort of romance in that "The Shop Around The Corner" style, and it's not--at all--which is great.

If you get annoyed reading about Fawn during the first half of the book, please keep going, or you are going to miss something lovely.

*I chose to use the word dross to describe all the crap Fawn heaps on herself during this book because I'm confident she would enjoy that wording.

Booksellers are a strange breed; often not the best at dealing with real people or the real world, and sometimes rather lacking in the social graces. Elizabeth Green's protagonist, Fawn Birchill, certainly fits the type. The problem is that the book is - I believe it's an American expression - a 'hot mess'. It's a bit of this, a bit of that, some diary entries, some emails to staff, competitors and a local business reviewing site but it's singularly lacking in any sense of a narrative thread. Also, whilst I read an ''uncorrected proof' from Netgalley and the publishers (thank you), the book has been published just a few days ago and I can only hope that quite a lot of work was put into improving the layout for Kindle. Trying to keep track of the emails when they stretch over multiple screens is not so easy.

Fawn is a self-deluded, smug, out-of-touch fantasist who has completely failed to move with the times. She is rude to everybody, treats her staff horribly, her new competitor with unjustified disdain, and seems only to really like her elderly tenant (who is away with the fairies) and her cat. Her resentment of her elderly father who is dying in a hospice has set her apart from the rest of her family.

This is no 'You've got mail' with small, lovingly nurtured old fashioned bookshop up against a giant chain bookstore. Instead, her competitor is a much younger bookseller who - unlike Fawn - has moved with the times. He has coffee. He has cats - five of them. He has evening 'events' that are so popular that they make lots of noise. Fawn's bookshop is old, damp, smelly and unwelcoming. Her building is falling down around her. Things leak, break, and have seen much better times.

A lot of reviewers seem to have given up really early on and I understand that. It's only my determination to provide a review that kept me going against all odds. The book was deeply irritating - the format, the characters, the premise, all set my teeth on edge. BUT, against all odds, the ending raised this from a one-star to a two-star read. It's a shame that the mess of the first 95% of the book means that most readers may well not stick with it to see how Fawn (sort of) sorts herself and her shop out.

Thank you Netgalley for allowing these opinions from the mass of readers. I must say I wanted to settle down to a good relaxing quick book at the end of very stressful days while working long hours cooped up in my home due to the quarantine measures In place in our zones.

I was attracted to this book by the title and then by the front cover, however much to my disappointment I endured a couple of hours of torture reading annoying emails from and to the main character named Fawn, who is the owner of a badly run bookstore. Ever heard the expression “You’re being a Karen“. This is when someone is an annoying know it all, who points everyone’s faults like there is no others. But does not acknowledge her own mistakes.

I cannot will not subject myself to the next 6,000 pages left to read. Simply horrid.