I selected this book for my book club. I went to the book shop and asked for something that wasn’t depressing and this was what they suggested. I didn’t really like it, but I didn’t hate it either. I didn’t care about the characters at all – the dialogue (particularly between Vivian and Gabriel) was wooden. It started well – the first chapter was great and I had such high hopes. I was also hoping for more Perth/Fremantle imagery – this novel could have been set any where.
Here’s the blurb …
Meet the Budd-Doyles: a suburban family in shambles, and about to unravel further as Helen Budd-Doyle in one fell swoop destroys her bed, abandons the family home, and buys a second-hand bookshop form a man in a pub – leaving her bewildered junk-collecting husband Arnold to sort out his life. But he can’t. Enter Gabriel, one of their sons, wreaking havoc as he pushes his father to sell off the accrued junk of a lifetime. Add a little sibling rivalry with his brother Vivian fresh home and licking his wounds from a life in far north . . . and watch the fireworks on Jacaranda Street.
The Bookshop on Jacaranda Street is a brilliant black comedy by a unique new Australia voice, its world peopled by an extensive cast of misfits – eccentrics, innocents, cranks and pariahs – and driven by an inexorable urge to make order out of chaos.
If only life was like a book . . . in that everything made sense and you know all will be resolved in the end. If only life was like a book so that, if you decided you didn’t like it, you could take it back and get another one.
Here are some other reviews …
http://chrlreviews.blogspot.com/2009/07/bookshop-on-jacaranda-street-by-marlish.html
http://rodneylibraries.blogspot.com/2009/09/book-review-bookshop-on-jacaranda.html