As a writer, reader, and bookshop-lover, it’s little surprise that The Last Bookshop was a title that immediately caught my interest. Set in an altered Perth in 2016, Emma Young’s protagonist, Cait Copper, is the owner of Book Fiend, the final independent bookstore still in business in the Perth CBD. While there are threads of romance and familial dynamics woven through the story (and I’ll be honest, I was expecting the romantic storyline to dominate the narrative far more than it did), the central focus is Cait’s struggle to keep Book Fiend in business in the face of hiking rental costs due to the encroachment of chain stores with deeper pockets, into surrounding retails spaces.
On the whole, I really enjoyed The Last Bookshop. While I picked how much of its plotlines would be resolved from relatively early, this was nevertheless an enjoyable journey to go on, and one that felt important to read given the rallying cry to support physical bookstores across the COVID-19 lockdowns last year.
With that being said, the book had some issues, such as exposition dumps in the first few chapters which nearly put me off—there were definitely more elegant ways to give the reader the information crucial to describing the economic landscape. Similarly, while the information about Cait’s life leading up to her opening Book Fiend is important to establish that she’s good at her job and that the store has particular significance to her, I felt it could have been conveyed in a far more interesting and efficient manner. Fortunately, these pages of information dispensing disappeared after about the third chapter, and the writing really started to flow from then on.
What was most frustrating was that the characters of store employee, Seb, and ‘mystery shopper,’ James, felt at times a little two dimensional or underdeveloped. James’ increasing frustration with Cait’s single-minded drive to keep Book Fiend alive at the expense of not only her relationship with him, but her wellbeing, left me feeling as though he was intended to come across as an unsupportive, unpleasant romantic interest who doesn’t understand why Book Fiend is so important to Cait. Except, while he could have communicated his feelings to her more respectfully, I was never sold that anything he felt or did was unfair. Her insistence on continuing to operate the way she always had, although it was clear she wouldn’t generate the increased revenue required to pay her rent, without ever once considering that she might need to alter her operations was a bit frustrating to read, and it made sense to me that someone who cared for her would be similarly frustrated. I won’t go in to further detail because I don’t want to give too much away, but I definitely felt as though Seb was given unexpected and abrupt character development and depth about two thirds of the way through the book. While it wasn’t ultimately a huge problem, it nevertheless felt as though this aspect to the story could have been handled far more deftly than it actually was.
Re-reading some of this review, I am aware it might sound as though I didn’t enjoy the book, but I did and quite a bit. I actually found myself irresistibly drawn to it, quite keen to know what happened next.
Perhaps most poignant is Cait’s relationship with the older customers and friends. It’s not simply the way the mother figure of June cares for her, but the manner in which gruff Max expresses how much it means to him to have Cait and Book Fiend in his life. Even Mr Cowper, a crochety in-store regular is portrayed in a way that makes him real and endearing.
I wonder if Young’s decision to have much of her secondary characters as elderly was informed by her own experience and observation about the way bookstores play a particularly important in the lives of the aged from her time as a bookseller. I think that some of The Last Bookshop’s best parts is the way it deftly demonstrates how bookshops are hubs of community, and are profoundly appreciated by those who patronize them, while stopping just shy of being didactic about the point.
Indeed, it’s been a long time since I teared up while reading a book, but it was consistently the scenes featuring the older characters, and the way a single bookshop and dedicated bookseller can have a genuine and meaningful impact on their lives, that did it. The fact that The Last Bookshop generated such a strong emotional response reinforce that it really is a good read.
At its heart, the strength of this story is that it is a quiet case for the power and importance of bookstores, and a gentle suggestion to readers to ensure that if the world they like includes bricks and mortar bookstores, they need to safeguard that world. For that reason alone, I recommend this book.
The Last Bookshop is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Cait is a bookshop owner and book nerd whose social life revolves around her mobile bookselling service hand-picking titles for elderly clients, particularly the grandmotherly June. After a tough decade for retail, Book Fiend is the last bookshop in the CBD, and the last independent retailer on a street given over to high-end labels. Profits are small, but clients are loyal. When James breezes into Book Fiend, Cait realises life might hold more than her shop and her cat, but while the new romance distracts her, luxury chain stores are circling Book Fiend’s prime location, and a more personal tragedy is looming.
