The Lost for Words Bookshop, by Stephanie Butland

Trigger warning for domestic violence.

Lovejoy Cardew is in hiding. She has good reasons for laying low. There’s the notoriety of what happened with her parents. There’s the lingering trauma of foster card. There’s the obnoxiously persistent ex-boyfriend. But when books from her past start to arrive at work at the beginning of The Lost for Words Bookshop, by Stephanie Butland, Lovejoy rethinks the wisdom of hiding. Perhaps the time to hide is over and it’s time for her to get angry and live.

I really enjoyed taking a peek into Lovejoy’s life. (Also, her name is the best.) When we first meet her, she’s a quiet employee of Archie’s York-based bookshop. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of the store’s contents and can find readers anything they ask for. The biggest annoyance in her life is Rob, a former boyfriend who won’t take no for an answer. Her biggest fear, we learn, is that she will be found out once more as the daughter of a violent father and a criminal mother. It takes several chapters for us to learn what actually happened; the writing moves luxuriously slowly. Some chapters are set in 1999, when Lovejoy is nine, in the last happy year she spent with her parents. Others are set in 2013, in the months when she dated Rob. The chapters in 2016 show Lovejoy as slowly falls in love with poet and magician Nathan—and as she tries to figure out who is sending her books that she knows her mother owned.

Some of this plot summary makes it seem like The Lost for Words Bookshop sound a bit like a mystery. That’s not really what this book is about. Rather, this book is about how difficult it is to break free of controlling, abusive relationships. The relationships in this novel are like frogs in boiling water. The wronged partner (with one notable exception) doesn’t leave immediately. They’re invested in the relationship. They believed their abusers’ apologies. They stay long enough to be hurt terribly. There’s no pity in The Lost for Words Bookshop, only understanding, for which I am very thankfully. Domestic violence is not used to create instant backstory or to raise the stakes for narrative tension. This book also offers a deep look at what it might feel like to be a secondary victim of domestic violence: it’s not just the partner who is physically and emotionally hurt, but also their children.

I really enjoyed the emotional depth of The Lost for Words Bookshop, as well as the thread of book love that runs through the entire story. I also loved watching the relationship between Lovejoy and Nathan as it grew. The epiphany that hits Lovejoy towards the end of the book is so satisfying that I would have liked the book just for the conclusion. This is a great, booky read.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 19 June 2018.