Most readers adore books about bookstores and/or libraries. And why not, they are buildings filled with what we love: books! “The Lost and Found Bookshop,” however, opens with a funeral; not gradually in Chapter one, but upfront in the Prologue. It’s like a hand popping up and smacking you in the face as soon as you open the book.
Now do not run away, this book is about the bookshop and how Natalie Harper, Blythe Harper’s daughter and only child, has to use both her intelligence and creativity, to save this bookshop from going under. Blythe Harper was, “beautiful and inspiring, brilliant, but often foolish; quirky and infuriating, complicated and beloved.” Natalie inherited some of these traits too, but in a much more organized way. She cannot believe her mother let the debt get so high or the building fall into such disrepair. Grrrr, Natalie felt love, frustration and grief all at the same time. Well, at least she had, “Grandy,” Blythe’s father and her grandfather, who she loved dearly. They would have to try and save this bookshop together.
This story is the, “Great Adventure” and discoveries of historic significance, surrounding the one-hundred-year-old “Sun Rise Building” in San Francisco, that survived the 1906 ‘big earthquake.’ The building was many things before it finally held the current bookshop, including a famed bar and upstairs brothel; but Grandy’s family were the owners at the time of the earthquake. You are going to have to wait until nearly the end to find out how that all came about, but you’ll be so pleased you did.
While most of the story is about all the ways Natalie tries to earn money to pay off the debt so she can keep the bookshop and building, we all know it’s about the people she meets that will try to help her do just that. Most of the key characters are strong and wonderful individuals, from the staff, to the customers, and a particular handyman named, “Peach” and his seven-year-old daughter, Dorothy. As Peach makes repairs to the old building, he discovers a few hidden artifacts, some even valuable. And who knows, maybe they will find the buried treasure that Grandy insists is in the building somewhere, and more about Grandy’s father and his grandparents.
You will be immersed in this fantastic adventure so much you will not want to leave it.
Thank you Netgalley, HarperCollins Publishers, and Susan Wiggs