I read this book while I was half out of my mind with a high-fever flu, and it was exactly what I needed. It wasn’t a perfect romance – the romance is very understated – but a book about books, about finding yourself and others books to be friends with, and about finding the life you want had a deeply beneficial medicinal value for me, and I was tremendously comforted by it.

Summary time! Nina is an English librarian (the book is set in Birmingham and a very small village in Scotland) who is good at readers advisory but surrounded by a changing library world that’s contracting. Remaining funds for libraries require that her branch and several others close in favor of a centrally located library with an emphasis on technology and internet connectivity. The remaining branch has limited jobs and Nina and her co-workers have to compete with one another for very slim pickings that she’s not entirely sure she wants anyway. When the library’s HR offers them a career and personal discovery session, Nina has to take a look at what she’s dreamed of doing, and what she could or would like to do now that her autopilot life has been destroyed.

I generally like books about people who start over, who begin a life again this time focused on making choices and conscious decisions about what they want instead of defaulting to what’s expected, what’s easiest, or what’s next on a checklist whose usefulness they haven’t questioned. Nina is forced into that “Now what?” position by the loss of her job, and with her severance and a few bursts of desperation and desire, she ends up the owner of a used bread truck in a small town in Scotland that she wants to turn into a mobile bookshop. Her original plan was to bring the truck to Birmingham and set up shop there, but that doesn’t prove as easy as she thought it would be – plus all the people in the town where the truck had been listed for sale grew very excited about the idea of a bookshop on wheels, since they hadn’t had a library or a bookshop in years.

Nina’s journey moves forward in stops and starts, first while she’s figuring out how to chase her dream and discovering pieces already completed in her life that she’d done almost unconsciously. Those pieces and other signs and encouragement combined with the kindness form people who want her to make a choice already move her forward when fear or indecision would have stopped her momentum.

Nina’s way of seeing books and the way she interacts with them and with making recommendation resonated with me deeply. There are moments of poignant exploration of what books do for readers, and what they mean to people, that I found very touching, such as this one:

There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew – apart from, sometimes, music – to breach the barrier, to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduit between the two worlds.

There are a few moments of cliche and almost-impossible character events. There’s a dose of country-over-city preferential treatment that I expected, though with Nina’s experience in Birmingham and the loss of her job, it seemed understandable. The “things come very easy to this character” trope is here in glorious, flower-bedecked parade, too. Of course in the town there’s only one good rental option for a place for her to stay (which seemed unlikely) and of course it’s way underpriced and incredibly over-decorated and updated. Her friend and former flatmate Surinder suddenly had copious unused time paid off and appeared at odd moments to remind Nina of what she might be missing, and to encourage her to keep going and appreciating what she’s found. Surinder has an odd but lovely friendship with Nina, a mix of friend, taskmaster, and voice of reason, but their love and comfort with one another added another layer of fuzzy warmth to an already fuzzy warm story. The third person narrator also gives glimpses into the thoughts of some of the secondary characters that would have been fine stories on their own.

The romance stops and starts, too, since the story is mostly about Nina’s restarting her life and making decisions for herself instead of having them made for her. She lives so much in her own imagination and in her own head that her fantasy sometimes undermines her own judgment. Part of her development as a character is learning when to trust her judgment and when to get the hell out of her own head already and face reality, and her romance is part of that growth. The hero of the story, and I don’t want to get too specific because it’s kind of a spoiler, sort of, maybe, isn’t revealed as the romantic lead in a way that grabs your emotions and squeezes your heart, the way in some books all the clues become visible and you have to go back and re-read to see all the moments wherein he revealed his incredibly deep, squishy feelings for the heroine and neither you nor she realized it. (I love stories like that.) The hero in this book is pretty matter-of-fact about who and what he is, and where he is in life, and he’s not hiding much, but his emotional attachment to Nina grows somewhat realistically, though it’s mostly off the page. Still, when they ended up together, I was pleased and satisfied.

Nothing too surprising happens in this story. It’s a fish-out-of-water, restart-your-life-on-your-terms journey into an entirely new community in a new part of the world, which I love. Readers who want more realism or at least more sharp edges of reality might find it incredibly twee or too easy, but as a book in which to find much comfort, beautiful descriptions, community and found family, and a lot of book nerdery – so many books are mentioned in this story, it’s worse than the podcast, I swear – I recommend it.