The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks

3.75/5 I always struggle with books about main characters who are lying and keeping secrets from the important people in their lives. It's especially difficult for me when a romance is involved, since I feel like it undermines the level of consent due to one member of the pairing not being able to make a fully informed decision. This is one of those books. Maggie's reasons for lying to her best friend, love interest, and boss are all spelled out clearly, but it made me uncomfortable. I think the character journey of Maggie starting to figure out what her talents and passions were and why other jobs and career paths hadn't worked for her in the past was done pretty well, with some balance between showing and telling. I liked seeing her make connections with the townspeople, not just befriending them but creating a network that benefited everyone. I thought the old curmudgeon character was done much better in this book than The Lonely Hearts Book Club. I also liked the ending and the resolutions to the main plots. This falls into the contemporary fiction sub-genre of books about books, but Maggie the POV character isn't actually that much of a book worm. It feels more like one of those books about a woman in their 20s-30s still figuring their life out like Georgie All Along. I'm not sure how much the romance was supposed to factor in, but it felt like a sub-plot to me. (For those curious: There is one "sex scene" but it's basically just "and then we had sex" without any significant detail.) So, I guess in summary I didn't love or hate this book, it does some things well, and I wouldn't dissuade anyone from reading it who was already interested. The audiobook narrator did a good job, but I listened to her at 1.65 speed. Content Warnings: Minor: Bullying, Cursing, Infidelity, Misogyny, Racism, Sexism, Sexual content, Pregnancy, and Alcohol

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.

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.

There were a couple of times I thought "where's the bad??" It was a cute book

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.