Susan Coll

Cassie, a writing teacher in her fifties is at a crossroads in her life. Her husband a disgraced meteorologist has permanently moved to their basement due to his weather phobia, her daughter has just left for college and she has adopted a new puppy due to her feeling so alone. She has also had enough of her husbands self absorption and decides to go on a road trip to visit the bridge in West Virginia where her parents had died. Cassie has had questions about her parents death on the bridge show more collapse all her life but the aunt and uncle who raised her would shut down the topic any time she brought it up. Cassie wants answers and she is finally going to get them. Thus begins this wonderful story of a woman finding herself, finding new hope and new love. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and all it's quirky characters. The author has a wonderful voice and I love her writing style, honest and slightly humorous. I highly recommend this novel and the narrator of the audio book I listened to was phenomenal. 5 solid stars. show less

Clemi is not having a good day. When she arrives (only mildly hungover) for her fourth day on the job as the program director for a nonprofit literary group, her boss is missing, the office has been ransacked, and there’s a large cat – to which she is allergic – observing the proceedings with aplomb. And it goes downhill from there.

Susan Coll has wasted no time in setting the stage for chaos, quickly dropping a good-hearted (if somewhat naïve) young woman into the midst of it. With show more the annual awards banquet of the vaguely-named WLNP (turns out there’s a reason for this lack of clarity) set for just three days away, Clemi does her best to deal with a demanding award recipient, various phone calls seeking information about her AWOL boss, and the last-minute cancellation by the banquet’s star fund-raising attraction, who “has been relegated to eternal horizontality” via an inconvenient heart attack.

The fun here is watching Clemi try to muddle her way through the rest of the week, with occasional assistance from unexpected sources, but mostly trading one crisis for another. Along the way, Coll takes wonderfully sly shots at nonprofit groups willing to invest a hundred thousand dollars in a social event that might net them a fifth of that in usable donations, at the wealthy donors who see their affiliation with a “literary-adjacent” event as an excuse to drag out the diamonds and swan around being seen, as well as at wannabe writers, cutthroat agents, and prima donna authors.

The whole thing winds up with an awards banquet worthy of the Marx Brothers, complete with wandering clowns, a talking chicken, a couple of not-quite-undercover FBI agents, and a misplaced bar mitzvah.

All in all, a delightful romp.

(I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.) show less

This is such a funny book. I especially liked it because it is about readers, an indie bookstore, and is set in the Washington, DC, area (local to me). The protagonist is the 50-some-year-old Jewish bookstore proprietor Sophie Bernstein, recently widowed, who is totally overwhelmed by her job and simply wants to hide away in a secret alcove within her bookstore. In the meantime, a controversial poet, Raymond Chaucer, whom people generally hate because they believe he drove his wife to show more suicide, is set for an author talk at the store on an especially rainy day when the bookstore unexpectedly becomes overcrowded. Also going on is that Sophie’s son is trying to set her up on some dates via a senior citizen dating service.

Reading toward the end of this book is like waiting for all hell to break loose. However, this is not at all meant in at bad way. The story itself is perfect light reading for those who are looking to escape life’s problems for a while (just like Sophie Bernstein and myself).

I liked this book so much because I was feeling a deep need for a light, warm, humorous and uplifting story. This novel was spot on and filled the bill. I particularly liked the chapter about the malfunctioning vacuum cleaner because it was hilarious!

Grab a copy of this novel, and start laughing. You’ll be glad you did. show less

What a mess! Wait, I mean a zany, chaotic, maelstrom of humour, sadness, profundity (a little bit), and vacuum cleaners. Well, that does sound a bit like a mess. But it’s a mess with its heart in the right place. And that place, of course, is a bookstore. Sophie Bernstein’s bookstore seems larger than most independent bookstores that I’ve encountered, yet still not large enough for a children’s section. However, it does appear to have everything else, including a secret (by which I show more just mean forgotten) nook where Sophie might just have to go hide. Because everything, not just the store and her life and the lives of her staff, is a mess. There might as well be a hurricane and a total eclipse of the sun. Oh, there is. Yeah, everything is a total mess.

In truth, the story does suffer from its messy virtue. We get to learn very little about the many characters who periodically seem central to the plot. And even parts of the plot end up not really mattering to the overall plot. I’d even go so far as to say that the bookstore itself is not essential. This level of zaniness could happen in any setting of overworked colleagues, I suppose. Plus, is it really true that virtually everyone who works at or even frequents an independent bookstore is in the midst of writing a novel? That seems unlikely. Of course the novel I’m writing is…

It’s not great literature. It’s just a bit of fun. And with that proviso firmly in place, it’s easy to recommend. Enjoy the mess! show less