This Book Made Me Think of You, by Libby Page
This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
"This Book Made Me Think of You" has a premise that all but guarantees a soft landing: a grieving woman, a stack of handpicked books, and letters from a husband who knew he would not be there to shepherd her through the first year without him. For the opening stretch, it works. The grief is immediate, the numbness feels recognisable, and the bookshop setting offers a believable kind of shelter.
»Crying like that had emptied her out completely.«
That is the novel at its best: plainspoken, emotionally attentive, and willing to sit in the messy quiet after a loss. Tilly’s tentative return to reading is also a lovely idea, because it promises something literature can genuinely do - give you language, shape, and temporary room to breathe.
The trouble is that the “journey” takes far too long, and not in a luxuriant, character-driven way. It is long as in dilated: set pieces that should have sharpened into transformation instead sprawl, repeat, and then, just when you are ready for the narrative to commit, it adds obstacles that feel designed rather than discovered. You can see the destination early on, and the detours only make that inevitability more frustrating.
Worse, the ending leans hard into calendar-style wisdoms - sentences that sound as if they were minted to be photographed, shared, and forgotten. There is a moment that should have landed as hard-won tenderness, but instead reads like a slogan.
»Love is always scary. But maybe we can be brave together.«
I confess I had the same reaction I left in my annotation: an involuntary “uh”. Not because the sentiment is poisonous, but because the book has not earned the simplicity; it feels like the novel wants to be deep without doing the difficult work of being specific.
In the wider field of bookish contemporary fiction, I kept thinking of novels that use reading as an engine rather than wallpaper - where the conceit tightens the plot and clarifies the emotional arc. Here, the conceit can become a mechanism for postponement. And, compared with brisk, unapologetically paced romance (Kendall Ryan comes to mind), Page’s hesitations feel less like tenderness and more like fear of finishing.
I have not read Page’s other work, so I cannot say whether this is a one-off wobble or a pattern. I can say that I wanted to love this, and, because the idea is genuinely beautiful, I ended up more disappointed than I would have been by a merely mediocre book. There is a good novel inside it. I just do not think this is quite that novel.
Three stars out of five.
Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam
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