Review: The Littlest Library

The Littlest Library by Poppy Alexander
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“But I'm not going anywhere,” Jess protested. 

“Not now, but you will, and when you do---when you are ready---you will unpack these boxes and it will be like I am standing there beside you; all our memories, all our precious times together, wrapped up in these books... Trust me. You'll see.” 

The Littlest Library was an incredibly cozy and comforting story about early thirties Jess moving to a new village after the grandmother who raised her dies. Jess is a librarian, which seems to be a dying profession, especially when the library she works at closes. Feeling the loss of grandmother Mimi, she takes a drive to clear her head and ends up in a small country village named Middlemas. There her car stalls and she stops to look at an old red phone box, that now seems to be the bathroom for lads coming back from the pub, and stumbles into an open house for the small cottage that sits behind the phone box. Even though the neighbor interrupts her from looking at the cottage, he's handsome but very grumpy about her stalled car blocking the road, she's still charmed by what the cottage, she mostly just saw the pond and gardens, could mean for her future. 

For hours her mind chattered and whirred, as she stared up at the sky through the skylight chastising herself for her idiocy, buying a house in the middle of nowhere, giving up everything she had ever known, for an uncertain future alone among strangers. 

Jess' parents died in a car accident when she was four and with the recent death of her grandmother, she's even more scared to love and put herself out there because, to her, everyone leaves anyway. When her grandmother was dying of cancer, she made Jess promise to be more adventurous, so calling the Realtor and buying the cottage, almost sight unseen, is Jess trying to live life fully. The cottage ends up needing a ton of work and there are bats in the loft that the local bat warren, handsome grump neighbor, says she can't get rid of, but she's actually starting to make some friends. Her childhood friend Hannah has been her only connection and since Hannah lives in New Zealand, Jess needs these connections. 

“Oh God, it's you,” he said. 

After Jess gets settled in Middlemas, she slowly but surely gets welcomed into the village townspeople fold. She gets pushed into cleaning up the old phone box and turning it into a library, using her precious grandmother's books. Throughout the story, people seem to be borrowing the right book at the right time and Mimi's legacy and warm advice gets carried on through the segments she underlined or the little messages she wrote in the books. I thought this was a lovely way to bring in the love and power of books and their stories. 

And now she had the pleasure of sharing her books---her memories---with her new community. 

There's Jess' grief over the recent loss of her grandmother, some of the secondary character stories have adultery, sisterly animosity, town rivalry, marriage dynamics, an ex-wife causing trouble, and just general life issues but while you feel the importance to the characters, as the reader, you're never drug down too much by them as the story keeps it's warm cozy tone throughout. 

One thing Jess did know was that she was home and life was full of nothing but possibilities. 

This is a book club fiction story, the romance between Jess and the neighbor, Aidan, has a kiss at around 50% but he's the one dealing with the ex-wife drama and thinks he can't really start anything with Jess so he can protect his pre-teen daughter from her mother's jealousy. Jess' attraction to Aidan is always there but Jess dealing with trying to get her life on track, making friends, putting herself out there, and finding a job that fulfills her soul instead of crushing it, is the main story here. There's some ending wrenches, a woman trying to get the phone box Little Library closed and Jess maybe having to move for a job, to create some worrisome feelings. However, the ending continues the promise of comforting and we even get a happily for now for our little romance. I can see this story being a favorite comfort read for many, the townspeople characters were many and varied but all the interconnecting friendships, especially with Jess, had them feeling like cherished friends. If looking for a sweet and comforting read that will transport you to the English countryside and has the love of books at the heart of it's story, then The Littlest Library needs to be your go to pick.

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