Blog Tour | The Bookstore on the Beach by Brenda Novak | Review

For fans of Elin Hilderbrand and Mary Kay Andrews, comes New York Times bestselling author Brenda Novak’s newest standalone work of women’s fiction, a big, sweeping novel about family and the ties that bind and challenge us. In this novel, three generations of women from the same family share a house and work together at a bookstore in Colonial Beach over the course of a summer.

How do you start a new chapter when you haven’t closed the book on the last one?

Eighteen months ago, Autumn Divac’s husband went missing. Her desperate search has yielded no answers—she still has no idea where he went or why. After being happily married for twenty years, she can’t imagine moving forward without him, but for the sake of their two teenage children, she has to try.

Autumn takes her kids home for the summer to the charming beachside town where she was raised. She seeks comfort by working alongside her mother and aunt at their quaint bookshop, only to learn that her daughter is facing a life change neither of them saw coming and her mother has been hiding a terrible secret for years. And when she runs into Quinn Vanderbilt—the boy who stole her heart in high school—old feelings start to bubble up again. Is she free to love him, or should she hold out hope for her husband’s return? She can only trust her heart…and hope it won’t lead her astray.

I was very excited about the premise of this book when I read it, let’s be honest almost anything featuring a bookstore could pull me in, but I finished this one with a feeling of wanting more and yet, also wanting less. It felt like there were too many different plots and sub-plots to be able to concentrate on any of them fully, and in some instances it felt like there were holes. It would have been nice to have some backstory on her missing husband, since he’s already missing at the beginning of the book. While I did enjoy the story overall, I would have liked some things to be paired down and refined, while I would have liked more from the ending. That being said there were a lot of things I did enjoy in this book, such as the characters and some of the threads being woven in the plots. It was an enjoyable read overall.

Brenda Novak, a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, has penned over sixty novels. She is a five-time nominee for the RITA Award and has won the National Reader’s Choice, the Bookseller’s Best, the Bookbuyer’s Best, and many other awards. She also runs Brenda Novak for the Cure, a charity to raise money for diabetes research (her youngest son has this disease). To date, she’s raised $2.5 million. For more about Brenda, please visit http://www.brendanovak.com.

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Happy reading!