The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks

"A sparkling bookish story about rules just begging to be broken." -- Abby Jimenez, New York Times bestselling author of Part of Your World and The Friend Zone

I, Maggie Banks, solemnly swear to uphold the rules of Cobblestone Books. If only, I, Maggie Banks, believed in following the rules.

When Maggie Banks arrives in Bell River to run her best friend's struggling bookstore, she expects to sell bestsellers to her small-town clientele. But running a bookstore in a town with a famously bookish history isn't easy. Bell River's literary society insists on keeping the bookstore stuck in the past, and Maggie is banned from selling anything written this century. So, when a series of mishaps suddenly tip the bookstore toward ruin, Maggie will have to get creative to keep the shop afloat.

And in Maggie's world, book rules are made to be broken.

To help save the store, Maggie starts an underground book club, running a series of events celebrating the books readers actually love. But keeping the club quiet, selling forbidden books, and dodging the literary society is nearly impossible. Especially when Maggie unearths a town secret that could upend everything.

Maggie will have to decide what's more important: the books that formed a small town's history, or the stories poised to change it all.

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336 pages

Average rating: 6.89

56 RATINGS

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5 REVIEWS

Community Reviews

Anonymous
May 19, 2024
10/10 stars
I picked this up on a whim since it showed up on a library search.

I truly enjoyed this book. Mostly because of the book discussions. I do think that a lot of what I liked about this book is that the author seemed to know what books I enjoyed and didn't. I loved that I found someone else who isn't a fan of Pride and Prejudice like me! I loved the twists on classics that were done. Wonderful!

I recommend this book.
Vulcan Vixens
Feb 18, 2024
4/10 stars
The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks was a well written palette cleanser story. Very appropriate for what's going on in today's climate and demonstrating how one person's single mindedness and discrimination can be damaging to a community; but also how all it takes is one person to inspire change. Everybody was a huge fan of Vernon and definitely felt Ralph could use a good smack to the face, with a chair. The general consensus towards Maggie and Malcolm was that they probably ended up just friends and that maybe their headboard banging (it was just twice, right LC Sherron? lol) could have been done without because the relationship felt forced and more like a delayed reaction of the writer to toss it in as a romantic element. Overall we like the author's writing style and had mixed feelings about how far we needed to read to get fully invested. The group gave it a mean rating of 3.9 stars out of 5.
Anonymous
Feb 03, 2024
8/10 stars
There were a couple of times I thought "where's the bad??" It was a cute book
LMahoney
Jan 26, 2024
8/10 stars
I really enjoyed this book. I liked that, even though I knew it would end happily, I didn't know how it would work out in the end. I want to attend Maggie's events! They sound so fun! I also appreciated that all the secrets Maggie kept made sense to keep. Normally, I am screaming at a book for the MC to just "tell the dang truth" but this time, I got why she kept secrets and it actually worked really well.
MorghanManier
Feb 11, 2023
7/10 stars
So cozy ♥️ Wish she would have went deeper with the relationship between Malcolm and Maggie but loved the ending and the feel good effect

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