The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina BivaldMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Synopsis (written by me): Sara, a young woman living in Sweden, has been pen pals with an elderly woman named Amy in Iowa and they have bonded over their love of books. Sara decides to visit Amy, only to arrive and find that Amy died recently. Instead of turning right around and going home, Sara sets about selling Amy's books and trying to introduce the townspeople to her love of reading.
I checked this out from my local library because I saw the title popping up in the bookish sections of the Internet and being referred to with warm regard. This is one of my repeated attempts to read something other than romance. I just finished reading it and I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
While the book itself was written well enough (there were no grammatical errors and Bivald did provide an interesting turn of phrase or two), I struggled with a few aspects of the book that I believe related more to my particular taste than a failing on the author's part. The book is set in a failing town, which made the tone a touch too melancholy for me. All the reviews of this book talk about how quirky the characters are, but I found them to be slightly odd at best. (Of course, I spent my early 20s devouring Tom Robbins novels, so my bar for "quirky" is set pretty high.) There were a few slight nods to romance that, as a romance reader, were not satisfying at all.
Still, the book was not quite as navel-gazing and slow-moving as I find a lot of literary fiction to be. Also, it was nice to read something outside my usual choices and not totally hate it. This is a gentle book that I could hand to anyone who would enjoy a story where an entire small town pulls together to achieve something.
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