The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katrina Bivald was my final read of 2023. And by that, I mean I finished the last page with less than an hour before the bells rang in 2024. For me, winter is a time for bracing walks and then with glowing cheeks, retreat indoors to snuggle up under a blanket and disappear into a good book. And you’ll be pleased to hear that Bivald’s debut novel ticks that box. It’s an unashamedly feel-good and happy-ever-after tale of a Swedish ex-bookstore employee who, by a twist of fate, ends up in a very small and down-on-its-luck Iowa town. At twenty-eight, Sara has finally decided to step out of her ultra-safe existence. Abandoning her comfort zone, she flies thousands of miles to stay with pen-pal and fellow book lover Amy Harris. Except there’s one tiny problem.
“‘Amy said you’d be coming,’ she said. ‘I won’t claim I thought it was a good idea, but it wasn’t my place to say anything.’ Then she added, almost as an afterthought: ‘You’ve got to agree that this isn’t the most … practical situation.’
‘Practical,’ Sara echoed. Though how Amy was meant to know she was going to die, she wasn’t sure. Others gathered around Caroline in a loose half-circle, facing Sara as though she was a travelling circus making a brief stop in town.
…
‘There’s a guest room, of course,’ said Caroline. ‘Sleep there tonight, and then we’ll work out what we’re going to do with you.’
The minister nodded and somehow it was decided: she would stay alone, in dead Amy Harris’s empty house.”
With so few Broken Wheel residents, everyone takes an interest in Sara or as she’s often referred to a tourist. And as we’re drawn into her world, Sara slowly starts to warm to its quirky inhabitants. And as they refuse to take any money for anything, Sara decides the only way to repay them is to open a bookshop. A bookshop stocked with her dead friends books. It will come as no surprise to the reader that Bivald grew up working part-time in a bookshop. I don’t know if the views are the author’s or her main character, but I thoroughly enjoyed Sara’s assessment of both the books and authors in her care.
“One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow up with something utterly mediocre. Or, and this was almost worse, one might have written a brilliant book but then turned out to be dead. Then there were those authors who started a series but never finished it.”
But that’s not to say the story is all about books because it isn’t. The residents decide Sara needs a holiday romance and there’s ongoing rivalry with the closest (and prettier) town. There are also plenty of characters with their trials, hopes and dreams to keep you merrily turning the pages.
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is one of those books that you know how it’s going to end and are happy to be taken along on the journey to get there. Although it isn’t set in winter, it does have that mug of hot chocolate, warming broth or rib-sticking fruit crumble with custard that warms your soul. If you’re a lover of good old-fashioned romance with a modern twist, give it a go.