School Library Journal Review
Gr 7 Up-It has been years since Rachel moved away from the city and the boy she had been crushing on. Before she left, she wrote him a love letter and placed it inside his favorite book, but he never responded. Now, Rachel has returned to the city and has been hired to work alongside Henry at his family's bookstore. The story is told with intermittent letters left inside novels, and these letters add depth and insight into the characters and the various relationships explored within. Crowley has created an interesting way for the characters to interact, and listeners will enjoy hearing a variety of book titles that they might want to pick up themselves. Narrators Hamish R. Johnson and Chelsea Bruland offer a variety of moods and voices. VERDICT A strong addition to a middle school, high school, or public library collection.-Elizabeth L. Kenyon, Merrillville High School, IN © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Eighteen-year-old Rachel, still traumatized by the death of her brother, wants to be far from the ocean where he drowned; she decides to move back to suburban Melbourne, where she grew up, to live with her aunt. Meanwhile, Henry, Rachel's former best friend in Gracetown, is also confronting loss: his girlfriend just broke up with him, and his parents have decided to sell their bookstore, his place of refuge. In this novel set in Australia, mostly at the bookstore, Crowley (Graffiti Moon) effectively conveys the complexities of love, death, time through Rachel and Henry's alternating narratives, as well as letters and notes pulled from the pages of old books. It's only after Rachel takes a job at the store that she begins to heal, coming to terms with her failures, Cal's death, and her rekindled love for Henry, who is wrapped up getting his girlfriend back. Filled with soul searching and philosophical quips, this book is for thinkers and lovers of literature who, like Rachel and Henry, are passionate about ideas and searching for answers. Ages 14-up. Agent: Catherine Drayton, Inkwell Management. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Rachel's best friend is the love of her life in this Australian import.By the end of high school Rachel realizes her fondness for Henry, her childhood buddy, has intensified. When she and her family moved to live on the coast, she left Henry a love note, but he didn't respond to it. After her brother, Cal, drowns, Rachel's grief is so profound that her heart goes into lockdown. Three years since she's seen Henry, Rachel returns, telling no one about Cal's death. The setting is Howling Books, owned and resided in by Henry's family. It's a neighborhood secondhand bookstore with a room called the Letter Library, where patrons underline passages and leave letters within books. By the time Rachel begins working at Howling Books she has forsaken her love of the sea, Henry has a girlfriend, and the bookstore is in peril. Shifting between Rachel's and Henry's voices with interspersed chapters of found missives, this is a story of longings hidden within the heart and revealed through the pages of books. Henry and Rachel, both white, are such honest, resonate characters that readers might want to join them for a cup of coffee, lingering over long conversations replete with silliness, accented by sadness, and blooming with ideas. This journey is original, wise, and essential, because as Henry points out, "Sometimes science isn't enough. Sometimes you need the poets." This love story is an ode to words and life. (Fiction. 14-18) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It's rare that a book beginning with epigraphs by Franz Kafka and David Foster Wallace lives up to those weighty words. It works in this small Australian novel because here, and in the bookshop that provides its setting, the weight of the words is measured by the connections between the people who read them. Three years ago, Rachel moved away after writing a love letter to her best friend, Henry, which he never received. Now she's back, having failed year 12 and lost her brother in a drowning accident but she's not speaking about any of that. She and Henry tenuously restart their friendship as Rachel works at the bookshop Henry manages. Rachel catalogs the shop's most unique feature, the Letter Library, which holds books with inscriptions, notes slipped between pages, and years of correspondence between lovers and strangers. It's a project that, like the book itself, is bittersweet: the bookshop is for sale, which could set Henry on a path directly away from Rachel. In Rachel's and Henry's alternating chapters, interspersed with excerpts from the Letter Library, the mysteries of love, loss, death, and missed connections are explored. As she did in Graffiti Moon (2012), Crowley has built a warm cast of surprising and memorable characters and placed them in universal circumstances that slowly unfold into something extraordinary.--Booth, Heather Copyright 2017 Booklist
