The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
Ratings13
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings13
Average rating3.7
Warning: once you let books into your life, the most unexpected things can happen…
This is a book about books. All sorts of books, from Little Women and Harry Potter to Jodi Picoult and Jane Austen, from to Stieg Larsson to Joyce Carol Oates to Proust. It’s about the joy and pleasure of books, about learning from and escaping into them, and possibly even hiding behind them. It’s about whether or not books are better than real life.
It’s also a book about a Swedish girl called Sara, her elderly American penfriend Amy and what happens when you land a very different kind of bookshop in the middle of a town so broken it’s almost beyond repair.
Or is it?
The Readers of Broken Wheel has touches of 84 Charing Cross Road, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Chocolat, but adds an off-beat originality and intelligence all its own.
Reviews with the most likes.
Reading Challenge category: a book about your hobby or passion
So beautiful. I have fallen in love with this town and these people! A slow natural progression of feeling. Nothing is rushed. It has a great small town Midwestern feel. This is just a heart warming book.
Had some trouble to get into the story, but once there it was a warm and lovable experience.
Sometimes I go into reading a book with such big hopes and yet the book can miss when it comes to plot, miss when it comes to characters, and miss when it comes to believability.
That is true of Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend.
The plot is farfetched: a Swedish woman comes to America to finally meet her pen pal only to learn her friend has died. Instead of returning home, the woman decides to open up a bookstore in her friend's dying Midwestern town.
The characters are farfetched; romance between an incredibly shy foreigner and an incredibly shy American man seems impossibly unlikely.
I usually give up on a book that isn't working for me. I kept turning pages with this book and read all the way to the end. I don't recommend it, but I must admit that something in me loves the idea of a story in which a dying town is revitalized by a bookstore.
