Review: Bookishly Ever After

Bookishly Ever After by Mia Page
My rating: 2 of 5 stars


What could be more appealing to readers than a book centred around books? The allure of a romance set in two bookshops with an enemies-to-lovers trope seemed like the perfect holiday read. Bookishly Ever After certainly has tropes in spades it might need a new one – ‘car crash romance’ if only to describe the whiplash the book gives you!

After inheriting her grandmother's bookshop, Lexi Austen leaves the UK and moves to Washington to live her dream of working with the books she loves. Everything goes well until COVID hits, the used bookshop down the road closes, and a shiny new one opens, bringing direct competition for Lexi. Enter Sam Dickens, the fiercely competitive rival bookshop owner, setting the stage for a fight for survival.

Romance novels are often slated for being cheesy but there's nothing inherently wrong with that. You know that a bookshop romance is going to be really cheesy when the main character names are Austin and Dickens so I dove into this book expecting a cheesy, potentially humourous journey. Lexi starts by lamenting the DC dating scene, mentioning she's been on 837 dates in six years—about one every two and a half days. As the reader watches her during her date she can’t even be bothered to remember the person's name. This indifference is a growingly used trope in movies but not something that really works in books. There’s something about the first-person narrative of a book that makes you the character, and the rudeness is jarring. This is the first scene in which you experience Lexi and it does nothing to endear her to readers like myself.

With her dating life uneventful, Lexi decides to woo her competitor purely to distract him and win the "bookshop wars." Despite hating him, she believes she'll be in control, setting the stage for the slow-burn enemies-to-lovers story promised by the blurb. But within three pages, she's completely obsessed.

Every chapter reminds us that Lexi is British (though born in the US, a detail that feels unnecessary), loves tea (despite drinking a lot of coffee), her grandmother left her the bookshop, Sam has green eyes and oh yeah did she mention that she is British?. The constant repetition of her Britishness felt overdone. As a fellow Brit who loves tea, even I found it too much. It genuinely felt like an American trying to write a British person by including every stereotype that they could:

“She grins with all her yellowing British teeth.”

It got to a point where it felt insulting and I was genuinely shocked to find that Mia Page is actually a British author. Reading other reviews it's clear that she also offended her American readers too. If these details added value to the story, it might be okay, but they make up the lead character's entire personality, leading to another problem: the characters are at best flat, at worst dull, and uninteresting. This isn't helped by the constant re-summarising of events, making the book repetitive. What should be full of drama is instead full of self-pity and pettiness.

For all that I disliked about Bookishly Ever After the author did do a few things well. The author lived in DC for a while and the vibe of the neighbourhood and the Capitol Hill area of DC is beautifully described, showing her love for the place. She also perfectly manages to capture the feeling of never fully fitting in anywhere ever again once you have lived in another country for a while, something I know from personal experience and you can tell the author does too.

Overall while there are some parts that I enjoyed this book didn’t have the romantic feel that readers expect when picking up a romance book. There was none of the anguish that usually comes with enemies to lovers and portraying a book set in Washington DC as a ‘small town romance’ just feels out of place. It feels like the author was trying to do a modern take on Pride and Prejudice but sadly fell short of my Great Expectations.

Thank you to NetGalley and Avon Books for providing me with this eARC. All opinions are my own.


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