Cute book but wayyyyy too long. I liked Hallie and Dimitri but sheesh so much extra text about his illustrations and every bit of their conversations. I skimmed most of the book because it was just too wordy.

Loved how you could really relate to Hattie, how her life has more ups than downs. How she is so so clumsy that she could fall over fresh air and begins to believe that her life is meaningless. But then a unexpected raffle win, sends her life upside down. She cannot believe her luck that something that she loves “Books”, could change her life for the better in more ways than one. This book shows how you can lose yourself in a story, how friendships are made over a cuppa and please don’t forget the biscuits. When you read the book this becomes clearer. You find that people are unexpected what you see isn’t all you get and your gut instinct is generally always right

This is a beautiful book! I felt like I was transported to the town of Buntingorden and was peering through the mermaid window display to catch a glimpse inside of Once Upon a Page. I was completely invested in the bookshop (can I own one now please?!), the characters, the relationship between Hallie and Dimitri and the love notes inside of the books. My favorite quote was, "books contain whole worlds to get lost inside" and that could not be more true. If you are a book lover, then this book is for you!!

I really loved this book and I can honestly say that I hesitated to finish this book because I loved it soo much. The characters are soo relatable. Being a book worm myself , I loved the concept of love between two people who share the passion for books The concept of the book was also beautiful. I have actually wondered about the messages in second hand books myself. I loved the writing style and I will definitely read more books by the author.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for an advanced copy of this book.

I loved the characters in the book and all their quirks. Once Upon A Page is the perfect name for a bookshop and I visualised it to be like the little crooked bookshop in Canterbury that we visit from time to time.

It’s a really nice easy to read story but I found that by the middle of the book it was starting to become a little repetitive in parts and predictable. The romance between the two main characters develops very slowly so hence why the story seems to drag on.

Still worth a read if you like “book shop” reads.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the author and publisher through Net Galley in exchange for my review. And I'm so grateful for the chance with this book, because I feel like I may have found a new author to follow! I'm not usually one to read this style of book, I usually go for the mystery/suspense genre, but the description of this book just sounded so good, I wanted to take a chance with it, and I'm so grateful to have had the chance to read this book. I can see myself seeking out others by this author when I want to mix things up a bit with my usual reads. The characters were fun to get to know, well developed with not too much back story. I could relate to both Hallie and Dimitri's love of talking about books, I loved the fairy tale quality of the book store and the kindly old man who gave the store to Hallie. I loved the feeling that the bookstore would know what book you needed, when you needed it. I loved the scavenger hunt for books with messaged written inside. Hallie's mom was a bit much to take, but she also seemed very realistic, sadly!

And something else I really appreciated about this book - they fell in LOVE with each other, got to know each other's lives, had the awkward first hug and the anticipation of the first kiss. But didn't jump into bed. I think that's what takes away from the romance related genre's to me a lot of the time - the sex. Yeah, it's part of life, but it's so refreshing to read a love story without the clothes falling off. I like that I could hand this book off to my teenager daughter - or son - and not worry that they'd get an eyeful. (The bit about the dick pic/dic pic thing was funny too, and I might have fallen in love with Dimitri a bit on that one - so funny!) I felt like this was a really full, complete story, without the bedroom scene. I appreciate an author who is willing do cut if off there.

Amazing book, loved the story line! Actually made me want to go to visit the shop! Jaimie has done it again! This book a must read relaxing in the garden with a refreshing drink!

This is a cute and lighthearted story. Things are not going well for Hallie, until she wins the ownership of a bookshop. Maybe not very realistic, but still a nice idea. She works on learning how to run the bookshop and fall in love along the way. Maybe a bit cheesy, but yet very enjoyable.

The Little Bookshop of Love Stories is a bookworm's dream. Hallie is never lucky in life. In fact, she's just lost her job... Again. She doesn't think her life will ever come together until she receives notice that she is the winner of the raffle to be the new owner of the Once Upon A Page bookstore in the Cotswolds. Talk about a change of luck, right!? This book is filled with bookish references that I ate right up. I loved the main characters and all their quirks. It does get a little repetitive in parts and a tad predictable, but I wouldn't have wanted this cozy bookish delight to be anything else. 3.5/5⭐️

This is the first book I’ve read by this author. It’s an enjoyable tale and quite easy to read but begining of the book was quite slow and took some time to get into, I’m glad I stuck with it and am sure many others will love it. Thank you to NetGalley and the author for the chance toread and review.

"Books are magical in that they can transport you to another time and place, introduce you to people you come to know as friends, in both characters, authors and now in real people who, at some point in their lives, have chosen each book as carefully selected gifts for someone they cared about."

Robert Paige had been a bookseller at Once Upon A Page for so long he could remember. It’s a lovely shop in the tiny Cotswolds village of Buntingorden with a stock of more than 30.000 books and a history with over 150 years. It’s the sort of shop you could easily lose a day in. Now it was time for Robert to retire. He wasn’t selling Once Upon a Page – he was giving it away to someone who wanted to take over running it. And to make it fair, in the months leading up to his retirement, was selling tickets for a prize draw to choose the winner.

That’s where Hallie Winstone comes in. She is a thirty-five-year-old bookworm. A bit awkward, a bit cumsy and attracts misfortune every damn day. On the Mondayest of Mondays she gets fired from her job. The job had been going well too. She’d been there almost a year, and apart from a few warnings about the clumsiness and the wage deduction for breakages, being a waitress at a pub wasn’t too bad. She was on her final warning for clumsiness so she lost her job. Again.

Bad luck seems to have been with her entire life. Everyone has “one of those days” occasionally, but she seem to have them every day. It’s a rare event worth marking on the calendar when something doesn’t go wrong. Her usual types of the days are the ones where you loose your job, flood your flat, and walk in your boyfriend snogging someone else in all the same afternoon. I’ve had more than one day like that. Everyone’s luck has to change sometime!

That’s until her luck changes and she finds that she is the winner of a Once Upon A Page. Maybe this is why she never had any luck in her life. Maybe it was all being saved up for this moment. Hallie loved this bookshop since she was a kid and had been a regular customer ever since. Working in a bookshop is what she dreamed about her entire life. The problem with this whole thing is that beyond a few shift in the local library when she was sixteen, she don’t know anything about bookselling, and even less about owning a struggeling business. This is Hallie chance to turn the shop into Once Upon A Page of her dreams, like starting from scratch with a blank palette. And no matter how convinced she is that something is going to go wrong, she’d have to throw my all into this and save Once Upon a Page. Is Hallie going to turn things around?

"Books have always been my escape from daily life and now they are my daily life."

Surely it is every book lover’s secret dream to own a bookshop. How amazing would it be to own a bookshop? To get to live and breath books every day? To get paid for stroking books, arranging books, talking about books, recommending books, and thrusting books into the hands of unsuspecting strangers?

Every review that I’ve read for this book has been positive and mine will be no exception. I’m so glad that I’ve read this book and can now see what all the fuss is about. I absolutely adored it. Definitely in my top favorite books in 2020. I could gush about how much I loved it all day long. The writing is gorgeous. The story original and funny and easy but at the same time heartbreaking and complex. Jaimie Admans seems to be a natural storyteller, the sentences just seem to flow and she makes her books very hard to put down as the story is taking its tuns, mysteries are unravelled and secrets are revealed.

Hallie is a very loveable and heart-warming character. I felt a very strong connection between Hallie and myself. In some parts I thought Jaimie was writing about me. We have so much in common, except the clumsiness. Here are a few quotes I want to share that speak from my heart and are 100% me.

"I do better in relationships with ficitonal book boyfriends only. Real ones have never worked out for me. I’ve never felt a spark like the ones I read about."

"You expect men to behave like characters in books. No I wish men behaved like characters in books. They don’t – that’s the problem."

"Dimitri asked Hallie if you had ever been in love. Her answer was “No. I thought maybe I was once, but I’ve never felt the way characters in books feel. I’ve never felt that fluttery feeling, that urge to just be near someone. There’s never been someone I’d do anything for or who would do anything for me, or anyone I felt I could share everything with.”

Once Upon A Page sounded magical. I loved reading about this shop. I wish I had a bookstore like this in my hometown. In a bookshop everything feels better. It’s like being surrounded by different worlds, different lives, and whatever you’re going through, you know there are stories here about people who haven been through different things and always found a way to overcome them. I find that comforting somehow, even though they’re only fictional.

Dimitri litterly falls into Hallies life and the bookshop. He is dishevelled and rambly and endearingly clumsy. He is also very easy going and he seems to find something positiv at every turn. A guy who’s been through more than he ever lets on. Dimitri has stolen my heart. His story is so sad. The past few years had been very rough for him. Not long after his mum died, his sister got chancer and came back several time. Once the cancer came back Dani couldn’t beat it this time and she died. Since then he’ve been alone trying to find his way in the world again.

This book ticks almost all of my boxes. There’s one thing that really bothered me. Hallies and Dimitris romance is a slow burner. It develops very slowly, so the story dragged a bit and we could read very little about their time together at the end of the book.

I am sorry for all the rambling. I just hope you will enjoy this book as much as I did. I highly recommend this wonderful book to you. If you’re a book lover and in the mood for a light hearted, sweet romance, check this book out. I look forward to reading more from this author.

This book was everything I wanted it to be and more. Think Sophie Kinsella vibes but set in a charming little village bookstore.

Hallie has never been lucky, in fact she just lost her waitressing job AGAIN but her luck is about to change when she finds out she just won her favourite bookshop in the world, Once Upon a Page Bookshop. Not only that, but a gorgeous man by the name of Dimitri stumbles in to her shop on her first day and sparks fly. Whilst reorganising the shop, Dimitri and Hallie find amazing love notes written in the first page of countless books. Hallie knows that she’s be sent these books for a reason, she is meant to reunite long lost lovers with the help of their loves letters found in her books.

I honestly loved this book, it was just the right amount of romance, cheese and bookishness! Absolutely perfect if you are looking for something fluffy and heartwarming. Will absolutely be looking out for more books from this author. Thank you for the ebook copy NetGalley.

I don't typically read adult romance because...well. You can probably guess. But I've recently started requesting adult books from NetGalley because I've all but run out of YA to request (most of it historical/literary fiction - the first adult ARC I read was a short story collection about a Japanese family called "Inheritors" which was excellent, but not reviewed here because I imagine it would have almost no appeal to my readers), and I couldn't resist this. To my delight, it was exactly as charming, sweet, and clean as its cover appeared, so I'm posting it here because I feel like it might appeal to some YA readers who are looking to dip their toes into adult romance but aren't so sure about all the sexy stuff that abounds in that genre. 

SUMMARY

Today is the Mondayest Monday ever. Hallie Winstone has been fired – and it wasn’t even her fault!

Having lost her job and humiliated herself in front of a whole restaurant full of diners, this is absolutely, one hundred percent, the worst day of her life.

That is until she receives an email announcing that she is the lucky winner of the Once Upon a Page Bookshop!

Owning a bookshop has always been Hallie’s dream, and when she starts to find secret love letters on the first pages of every book, she knows she's stumbled across something special.

Things get even better when she meets gorgeous, bookish Dimitri and between them, they post a few of the hidden messages online, reuniting people who thought they were lost forever.

But maybe it’s time for Hallie to find her own happy-ever-after, too?
REVIEW

The best comparison I can come up with for this book is that it vaguely resembles the British equivalent of a Hallmark movie. However, that's not a perfect comparison, because even though it has the chaste romance, quirky premise, and predictability of a Hallmark movie, it's earnest, wholesome, sweet, and swoon-worthy in a way that very few of those are. (I should know. My mother has watched one every single night of quarantine and I am not exaggerating this figure in the slightest.) "The Little Bookshop of Love Stories" never claims to be anything but a sweet, escapist romance for book lovers, but that's a very good thing to be, in this escape-seeking book lover's mind. :)

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that this book...is good for the heart. (One thing it has in common with cardio, I guess.) It's wholesome, it's unabashedly kindhearted, its hero and heroine and their families and friends and neighbors are good people, and it desperately wants to make you believe in love. Yes, it can be sugary-sweet at times, but it means so well and is so overflowing with sincerity that it's very hard to fault it for that. (Not to mention that its leading man is the kind of guy this world needs a lot more of. Swoon.) The characters' love of books comes through loud and clear, the romance is a little bit slow-burn (one way it did remind me of Hallmark: it baited me with near-kisses but kept waiting almost the entire book for the one climactic time they finally did!) but earned and heart-melting, and you kind of can't read it and not want to visit the quaint English country town it is set in. The world is having a time of it right now, and "The Little Bookshop of Love Stories" created an idyllic little pocket of goodness for me to escape into. How could I possibly not love this book? 

ENDNOTES

Best Scene: um, honestly, anything that takes place in the bookshop made me *puppy eyes emoji that I wish I could use here.* And the dancing scene. 

What Stood Out: the book's unabashedly optimistic outlook and earnest sweetness. 

What Bugged Me: this book didn't really need a villain, so the one it had seemed kind of unnecessary.

Content: almost none to speak of - a little strong language (mostly British curse words and/or ones that are considered to be milder in British English than they are in American English) and a few sexual references but otherwise, almost shockingly clean for a romance novel. 

Rating: 5/5

Thank you HQ digital and net galley for allowing me to read this ARC

Who doesn't love a book about a bookshop!

Hallie reminds me of my younger self getting fired from jobs, Hallie and Dimitri are great characters this was so beautifully written.

I loved this story about a bookshop and secrets.

Such a fun happy read

The first book I have read by Jaimie but not the last.

An adorably cute and charming read, buzzing with charismatic characters and delightful subplots.

Hallie is a klutz and she hasn’t had much luck in the job or boyfriend department. After a truly awful day at work, which resulted in her losing her job, she opens an email to tell her that she’s won a bookshop. She can’t quite believe it and is ecstatic to leave her womanising and unfriendly housemate behind to run the bookshop she’s visited forever, when visiting her mum and sister.

Robert, the owner of the bookshop, gives Hallie a whistle stop tour of running the bookshop, before moving out of the area, leaving her with only an address to contact him.

Dimitri, a villager that Robert allowed to use the bookshop as a workspace (to work on some drawings for a book that he’s been commissioned to do the illustrations for), stumbles through the door on her first day of running the shop. Subtle sparks fly and Hallie feels a connection to him straight away and they forge a friendship.

Each day, Dimitri visits the shop to draw and he helps Hallie in the process. Whilst doing a stock-take, they stumble across hidden messages and notes between the pages of the books and it leaves them intrigued by the strangers’ stories.

Hallie loves being around Dimitri and the feelings seem to be reciprocated, so there can’t be a catch can there? Things can’t be this perfect can it?

I absolutely loved the quirky relationship between Hallie and Dimitri and I really liked how the author littered the book with bookish sayings and such - this is a real pull for bookworms and as an avid reader, you find yourself nodding away to them.

If you want a cute, easy read, with a HEA, this is the book for you! Enjoy!

Thank you to NetGalley and HQ Digital for the the ARC, in exchange for an honest review

Charming and delightful. An excellent addition to collections where light women's fiction and contemporary romance are popular.

Leider ist der Titel dieses Buches keiner, der aus der Masse heraussticht: „Little -Whatever-Shops of Something“ gibt es gerade wie Sand am Meer. Und Buchläden sind ganz besonders beliebt (welcher Leser liest nicht gern über die kleinen, schnuckeligen Buchläden der Welt?).
Aber der Buchladen der Liebesgeschichten sticht für mich aus zwei Gründen hervor: zum einen schafft Jaimie Admans es, den Bogen von einem jahrhundertealten Buchladen zu Social Media zu schlagen. Ich fand es in vielen anderen Büchern eher unrealistisch, wie den Läden wieder zu Erfolg verholfen wurde. Hier sorgt Hallie online für viel Aufsehen, was sich auch offline auswirkt.
Anders als in vielen vergleichbaren Büchern, verkauft Hallie auch Secondhand-Bücher und findet darin die Botschaften, die sie online teilt. Normalerweise ist es der Inhalt der Bücher, oder ein besonders aufsehenerregendes Shop-Design, dass den Buchläden in den Geschichten helfen soll. Dass dem hier nicht so war, fand ich gut. Zudem sorgten die Botschaften auch dafür, dass einige witzige, süßen oder unglaublichen Beziehungen eingearbeitet werden konnten.
Richtig gut gefallen hat mir auch, wie die Freundschaft zwischen Hallie und Dimitri beschrieben wird. Die beiden Tollpatsche haben aus ganz unterschiedlichen Gründen viele Probleme in ihrem Leben gehabt. Und wie verständnisvoll sie miteinander umgehen, ist schön zu lesen.

Hallie never has any luck in her life. She’s clumsy, lives with a horrible roommate and can’t hold a job. She often visits the Once Upon a Page Bookshop and is very fond of the owner. When he is ready to retire he starts selling tickets to win the bookshop. Hallie can’t resist this (small) chance and buys one. The bookshop only has one rule…it can never be sold. When Hallie receives the news that her ticket was pulled and that she’s now the proud owner of Once Upon a Page which also has a small apartment she can’t believe her luck. Nothing can go wrong ever again when you win a bookstore or is this a fairytale?

Hallie is in over her head when she takes over the bookshop. The shop isn’t doing well and it needs a miracle to survive. Dimitri knows the previous owner very well and he asks Hallie if he can keep coming to the bookstore to work from a very rare book. Together they spend most of their days and they connect on a deep bookish level. Hallie and Dimitri both are very kind souls. They love books and everything about them. I loved reading about their journey and how they grew closer together with each passing day.

I have loved books ever since I could read and I can build a small house with all the books that I own. Owning a bookstore would be my ultimate bookloving dream so I could relate to Hallie very well. It was very easy to connect with the excitement Hallie and Dimitri felt when they found book after book with a personal message inside. I enjoyed their journey to find the people behind these messages very much.

The Little Bookshop of Love Stories has a magical feel from beginning to end. I was hooked from the start and I couldn’t put it down. I was very invested to find out what would happen to the bookshop and how the friendship of Hallie and Dimitri would evolve. I could easily picture the street and town and would’ve loved to walk around and see all the little shops. If you’re looking for a story you won’t be able to put down The Little Bookshop of Love Stories would be a perfect choice.

Woah, just let me recover from one of the cutest books I've read in 2020. I fell in love with Hallie and Dimitri the moment I read about them. The interaction between them is so well written and Jaimie makes working in a bookshop sounding like a dream.

If you adore books, bookshops and a good romance story this book is for you. Hallie is a clumsy person who has not much luck in life until she wins a bookshop in Cotswolds. She has no experience with selling books but she loved them all her life. Dimitri is one of the villagers who helped the other owner and comes to the rescue. But not everything can be sunshine and rainbows, right?

I would totally recommend this book to everyone because it is a joy to read.

Thanks to NetGalley and HQ Digital for providing a digital edition of this book for review.

The Little Bookshop of Love Stories by Jaimie Admans. HQ Digital. General Fiction (Adult). Romance. Publication date: 08 May 2020. ISBN: 9780008331221. 5 Stars.

Super! This is the quintessential read for people who adore books and bookshops. And can you even imagine winning a bookshop—and in the Cotswolds to boot?? A fun and rewarding read, and a great addition to the genre of booklover lit! This is going onto my favorites list right now! People who love Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine or the The Bookish Life of Nina Hill may enjoy this one, too.

Thanks to NetGalley and HQ Digital for providing a digital edition of this book for review.