The English Bookstore in Bologna by Boo Walker [Audiobook Review]

Moving to Italy to escape your problems sounds like an excellent plan, especially when pasta and a charming bookstore are involved. Unfortunately, Boo Walker’s The English Bookstore in Bologna proves that emotional baggage follows you everywhere.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

If you’re going to have an existential crisis, Bologna is a pretty good place for it. There’s pasta, cobblestone streets, and in Boo Walker’s The English Bookstore in Bologna, a struggling little bookstore full of people who are about as confused as you are.

Italy can change your scenery. It can’t make your problems stay home.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Barrie Kreinik and David de Vries, and got a lot more invested in these messy expats than I expected to.

Welcome to the Bookstore

Walker makes Bologna sound ridiculously inviting. The streets and the food, plus a whole summer in Italy to reconsider every major choice you’ve ever made.

The only English bookstore in Bologna belongs to Sandy Cooke, who believes books are wonderful and people should be kept at a distance. But her employee Moira wants to turn the shop into a community hub.

Then there are the patrons: Bianca is a psychotherapist whose new self-help book is getting terrible reviews. Her father, George, follows her to Italy while he deals with retirement. And Harold is a young barista from Denver recovering from his first major heartbreak.

Despite their baggage, they all become friends anyway.

Starting Over Is More Complicated Than Changing Your Address

I liked that Walker understands how appealing reinvention is. When everything goes wrong, it’s tempting to believe a new city or a new version of yourself will fix it. Preferably somewhere sunny.

He doesn’t let them off that easily. Bianca still has her professional failure to deal with, George still has his regrets, Harold is still heartbroken, and Sandy is still keeping everyone at arm’s length.

Starting over takes a lot more emotional honesty than booking a one-way flight.

Finding Your People When You’re Still a Mess

The bookstore slowly becomes a place to belong for people who don’t have much in common besides being far from home and a little lost. Nobody has to have their life sorted out first.

My favorite pairing is Sandy and Moira. Sandy’s resistance to basically everything balances Moira’s hopefulness, giving the shop a personality. The larger group works too. Everyone has different problems and different defenses, and they don’t always make good decisions.

Letting someone in means giving up control and admitting you might need something. None of these characters are graceful about it, which is why it works. They don’t instantly understand each other or fix each other’s problems. They just slowly start to matter to each other.

Barrie Kreinik and David de Vries Make the Audiobook Shine

A character-driven story like this depends on good narration, and Kreinik and de Vries deliver. The characters have distinct personalities, and they never push too hard for sentimentality.

After a while, it stops feeling like someone is reading to you and starts feeling like you’re deep in the personal business of a group of strangers in Bologna.

Final Thoughts

The English Bookstore in Bologna is a warm, funny, sometimes meandering story about people who think they need to reinvent themselves and slowly realize they might need each other.

The friendships and the bookstore worked for me, and the book made me even more convinced that most problems would feel more manageable over pasta in Bologna.

Thank you to NetGalley and Brilliance Publishing for an advanced reader’s copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.