The Rainy Day Bookshop

A warmhearted multigenerational romance centered on a grief-stricken mother and daughter juggling family demands, love interests, and a local bookshop. 

Four generations of woman reside at the center of The Rainy Day Bookshop by RaeAnne Thayne, a moving multigenerational romance about how the past can influence the future.

 

Widowed Rosie Lucas has her hands full. Her 72-year-old mother, Sylvia--who established and maintained The Rainy Day Bookshop in the small town of Wood Briar on the Oregon coast--is slow to convalesce from an ice-skating accident. And her estranged daughter, Emma, returns to town with Olivia, her three-old-old, Rosie’s granddaughter, in tow. The timing seems providential, as Emma can now help out at the store. However, Emma’s return forces Rosie and Emma to deal with a secret that drove a wedge between their relationship years before. In the midst of them revisiting the past, a quirky, loner writer and single dad becomes a loyal confidante for Rosie, and Emma crosses paths with an old flame from middle school.  Can the two women, riddled with grief, reconcile their mother-daughter relationship? And are they willing to open their hearts to romance again? 

 

Small town life and the complexities of women’s issues are Thayne’s (Snow Kissed, The Lost Book of First Loves) specialties—and they shine in this tender-hearted novel of family dynamics and blossoming love.

 

The Rainy Day Bookshop by RaeAnne Thayne

MIRA Books (HarperCollins), $29.00 hardcover, paperback, 9780778307433, 384 pages

Publishing Date: June 2, 2026

To order this book on Bookshop.org, link HERE

 

Learn more about RaeAnne Thayne HERE

 

Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

Stories--in real life and in fiction--take on lives of their own in Julianna Baggott's, Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders. This sensitively rendered, well-balanced novel is told via four, female points-of-view. At the heart is Harriet Wolf, a reclusive, revered author of six adventurous novels featuring two characters, Daisy and Weldon, who fall in love with each other as children and as they age, from book to book, are "separated by wars and disasters, by acts of God and calamities of the heart. When they finally reunite they suffer." Harriet died before the seventh book was published, yet enamored readers believe it would've revealed whether the entire series "was a tragedy or a love story, whether humanity is basically good or doomed."

Harriet's daughter, Eleanor—a mother with two adult daughters of her own—despises and resents her mother's success and having had to share Harriet with the world. When Eleanor suffers a mild heart attack, her own fractured nuclear family reunites. This includes Ruth—married to a Harriett Wolf scholar, but trying to lead a "normal" life while estranged from the family for 14 years—and Tilton—a sheltered, "special needs" shut-in—who shared an intimate bond with her grandmother and made a pact with her regarding the rumored seventh book. With Eleanor ailing, is it time for Tilton to finally expose the mystery surrounding Harriet's last book?

With keen insight, Baggott (Burn) offers an original, richly textured story infused with dark secrets, promises, loyalties, love stories and the psychological complexities of family dynamics across generations.

Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders by Julianna Baggott

Little, Brown and Company, $26.00 Hardcover, 9780316375108, 336 pp

Publication Date: August 18, 2015

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (9/1/15), link HERE