Specs
Reviews
(4/5)The author wrote this series as kind of an homage to Japanese TV family drama/soap opera, and that’s what you get as a reader – a view of a big all-in-one-house family that grows and changes as the books go on. People fall in love, move in, move out, have vaguely mysterious pasts that get revealed, low-stakes stuff happens, the neighbourhood friends and locals lend a hand, the B plot miraculously ties in to the A plot at the end of each chapter, seasons turn (every book has four chapters, one per season), there are some scenes you can guarantee will turn up in every book, like the big breakfast scene where everybody talks over each other.
Language-wise it is straightforward, and because it's family-drama stuff there's no genre-specific vocab to worry about.
I would describe this episodic novel about a large family that run a second hand bookshop as cozy mystery. There's nothing life threatening or too dramatic, but each chapter has two or three mysteries on the go involving different members of the family and they're neighbors and friends.
The multiple story threads weaving in and out weren't that difficult to keep track of. Neither was the large cast thanks to the character list at the front of the novel.
I did find some of the resolutions to the mysteries a little trite, but overall had a good time with the story.