Sara is a Swedish young woman who is 28 and still living at home working at a bookstore in Sweden. Her life is very generic and seemingly going nowhere when she strikes up a pen pal relationship with an elderly woman named Amy from a small town in Iowa named Broken Wheel. As their penpal relationship progresses, on a whim Sara sends Amy a book and thus begins a friendship of sharing books, letters and stories across the continents. Amy invites Sara to come and visit her, and in a bold step Sara accepts but when she arrives in Broken Wheel she finds Amy has just passed away. Now here she is in a strange land in the midst of a quirky strange dying town with a bunch of quirky strangers living in a strange house. What is she to do? Her mother wants her to come home right away but Sara hesitates to throw away her long awaited getaway. Sara feels like a burden staying in Amy's home when Amy is not there and relying on town's people to get her places. She wants to pay rent to someone or fees for all the things she is using but in this strange town no one seems to pay for anything and the townspeople treat her the same way. Sara is driven to do something for them but what can she offer them? All she is really good at is reading and knowing about books. So Sara cooks up a plan to open a bookstore with all of Amy's books in a storefront that Amy actually owned in an effort to pay the townspeople back and bring a little life to the town through the joy of reading. But can the townspeople handle such a thing and will they accept it and therefore her?
This is a quirky little story from a Swedish author that became an international best seller. It is definitely character driven and does tend to chug along at a slower pace but the look into the different characters that make up a sleepy, dying town that is stuck in their ways is kind of interesting. Sara is a bit odd herself, being a introverted book nerd but as she and the town start to realize their appreciation of each other it's fun to watch them all open up. A lot of characters make up the story with quite a few minor story lines interweaving with the main one so sometimes it was a bit hard to keep everyone straight. There are some statements on marriage within the story that I totally do not agree with but it is within a discussion between two characters and does not make up the bulk of the book. There is also a few unwritten statements about the life of faith that didn't sit with me. While most of it was an engaging look into small town American life and the quirky characters who make the town go round and a look at an introverted young lady coming out of her shell to use her passionate love of books to find her place in life and bring some joy to a town sometimes some of the story went from sweet and sort of funny to a bit silly. It is meant to be a charming and uplifting story and for that it deserves it's credit. The translator did a great job, I thought, and it was an easy spring read.
I gave it a 8/10
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