Book (not) Bingo #19
At the Coffee Shop of Curiosities by Heather Webber
A mysterious letter. An offer taken. And the chance to move forward.
When Ava Harrison receives a letter containing an unusual job listing one month after the sudden death of her ex-boyfriend, she thinks she’s being haunted. The listing-a job as a live-in caretaker for a peculiar old man and his cranky cat in Driftwood, Alabama-is the perfect chance to start a new life. A normal life. Ava has always been too fearful to even travel, so no one’s more surprised than she is when she throws caution to the wind and drives to the distant beachside town.
On the surface, Maggie Mae Brightwell is a bundle of energy as she runs Magpie’s, Driftwood’s coffee and curiosity shop, where there’s magic to be found in pairing the old with the new. But lurking under her cheerful exterior is a painful truth-keeping busy is the best way to distract herself from the lingering loss of her mama and her worries about her aging father. No one knows better than she does that you can’t pour from an empty cup, but holding on to the past is the only thing keeping the hope alive that her mama will return home one day.
Ava and Maggie soon find they’re kindred spirits, as they’re both haunted-not by spirits, but by regret. Both must learn to let go of the past to move on-because sometimes the waves of change bring you to the place where you most belong.
This book was in my “daily deals” offers from Kindle recently, and my attention was caught by the first page of the sample, which is a help-wanted ad. Rather than try to summarize it, I’ll quote, since it’s short:
“Patient, energetic, unflappable in-home caretaker wanted for a peculiar, stubborn old man; a spoiled, she-devil cat; and a cluttered, possibly haunted beach house. No experience necessary but preferred skills include strong organizational and housekeeping abilities and an indifference to sharing space with a ghost, chaos, cat hair, dust, birds in the attic - or bats in the belfry as the case may more aptly be. Apply at your own risk on Monday morning, 9 AM, at Magpie's coffee shop in Driftwood, Alabama. Ask for the plum-tuckered Maggie.”
This, as I said, caught my fancy, and the book was offered at a substantial price reduction. Besides which, as I’ve mentioned, I’m trying to avoid simplistically written assembly-line cozy mysteries, so I decided to give At the Coffee Shop of Curiosities a shot. I’ll add that the book is advertised as being in the “magical realism” genre, which is a genre I wasn’t familiar with, so I wasn’t certain what to expect.
Heather Webber has good writing skills, which I may have mentioned in a few recent reviews is important to me and is not a given when one buys a book these days. Webber’s real strength, if At the Coffee Shop of Curiosities is any indication, is character development. There are a lot of characters in the book, and Webber manages to make all of them interesting and most of them engaging. Although, I will say that Maggie wore on my patience after a while. It was problematic enough to have a nearly forty year old woman who still couldn’t accept a tragedy that changed her life when she was eleven; it was bafflng to me that the entire small town “loved her so much” that they played along with her delusions rather than getting her help in coping with her grief. And, while this wouldn’t be something most readers would notice, it seemed peculiar to me that the peculiar old man who needed a caretaker was (cough, cough) several years younger than I am. (Why can’t I have a caretaker to clean my house, sniff, sniff.)
I also liked most of the “magical” elements of the story, which (until toward the end) were fairly subtle and easy to buy into: an elderly woman with the ability to see snippets of the future, a young woman who acquired extraordinarily heightened senses of hearing and smell after a near death experience, an almost middle aged woman with the ability to “match” random objects to people they will help. Unfortunately, toward the end, a few new magical elements were added in order to wrap everything up, and those weren’t nearly as easy to buy into.
On the down side, this is definitely not a fast paced book. The plot centers around character development, mostly (but not entirely) focused on Ava and Maggie, the two women mentioned in the Amazon blurb. Character development is fine and good, even necessary, but I thought the story dragged a bit. The biggest “action” parts were a few heated arguments. Also, as I alluded to above, I didn’t find the ending particularly realistic. I like happy endings, I truly do, but I found it really a stretch the way certain problems all worked out in the end. (Cue rainbows and unicorns.)
The bottom line here is that I enjoyed the writing style more than I enjoyed the genre,“magical realism” - which seems to require major contortions to tie everything up in pretty bows at the end. That’s not really my cup of tea. On the other hand, in doing a little post-reading investigation, I found that Heather Webber wrote a couple of book series before she turned to magical realism. One of those is a cozy mystery series, and I’ve discovered I have the first book in that series in my Kindle “unread deals” folder. It’s been there a long, long time … but, since I already own it, I will probably read it sometime soon. I might very well enjoy it. At least, since it’s the first in a series, everything can’t be tied up in pretty bows at the end, right?