The Bookstore Sisters by Alice Hoffman

Isabel Gibson has all but perfected the art of forgetting. She’s a New Yorker now, with nothing left to tie her to Brinkley’s Island, Maine. Her parents are gone, the family bookstore is all but bankrupt, and her sister, Sophie, will probably never speak to her again.

But when a mysterious letter arrives in her mailbox, Isabel feels herself drawn to the past. After years of fighting for her independence, she dreads the thought of going back to the island. What she finds there may forever alter her path—and change everything she thought she knew about her family, her home, and herself.

My Review

I often comment that a book is too long but The Bookstore Sisters is too short! I wanted more – more Isabel and Sophie and Violet and the dog Hank. I wish she had taken the Jack Russell as well as I desperately miss my beloved Pancake whom we lost last year aged almost 17.

Alice Hoffman has been one of my favourite authors – if not THE favourite – ever since I read The Museum of Extraordinary Things a number of years ago and then devoured every one of her books that had been released on Kindle.

In The Bookstore Sisters, younger sister Isobel is living in New York, having divorced her husband. She has a dog walking business, which includes the aforementioned Hank, the Labrador. Her sister Sophie still lives on Brinkley’s Island, Maine, where she runs the bookstore which their father left her to run when he died. Their mother died some years before. Isobel ‘escaped’ the island only returning for a funeral, falling out with Sophie and never returning, until now.

A very quick read but worth every minute and I loved it.

About the Author

Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including The World That We Knew, The Rules of Magic, The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, The Red Garden, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, and The Dovekeepers. Her most recent novel is Magic Lessons. She lives near Boston.