A brief, yet beautiful novella featuring charming and captivating character sketches. Not much by way of plot, but I was still satisfied with the storytelling and realistic ending. If it were a movie, this would not be the big blockbuster but the sweet surprise of a nice indie film. Enjoy. Edited to add more:
I think Alexis M. Smith was smart. Her novel has so much sweetness in it: lovely vintage frocks and charming tchotchkes at thrift stores and postcards sent from Amsterdam and vegetarian Chinese restaurants and awkward flirting and short vignettes of storytelling and dreams and the most amazing job of working in a library restoring books.
It is so sweet and endearing and wonderful that it could have been saccharine and trivial and vapid. It could have been fluffy feminine drivel. But the slender plot line that exists is of a girl liking a boy is kept very real and down to earth. There is no dreamy hipster lens for lovers who cannot be together. There is no perfect Hollywood ending. There is life.
A review for the book cannot be long because the book is rather short. The action (if one can even call the series of these events action) takes place in a single day. Smith spends so much time sketching marvelous characters with such detail and care that readers would be able to spot Isabel in a crowd, going to work or meeting up with her friend Leo. She is written so fully alive that at times I was disappointed to be reading her story and not observing her out in the real world.
All of this characterization delights me, but I read from some reviewers they were disappointed by a rather abrupt ending. I liked the ending. I personally don't want all of the novels I read to be wrapped up with a bow or to be poised for a sequel. The book had a conclusive nature to me even if it wasn't wholly satisfying and fulfilling for my characters (see, that appropriation of the character is what makes this such a fantastically sincere and sweet book).
As soon as I finished, I immediately searched back through the pages looking for those little lines and quotes that had me smiling when I first read them.