I was swept away by the beautiful world Ireland and fairy folklore. The two storylines of Sarah (modern day) and Anna (100 yrs prior) were crafted seamlessly. Both of their stories are engaging and thoughtful. The story delves into grief with sensitivity and deep understanding. It was so beautifully described, I took notes. The story took an unexpected turn but brought it to close in a satisfying manner. There are some trigger warnings as it addresses the topics of sexual assault, death, and infant loss.

I definitely enjoyed this one more than The Lost Bookshop. I thought the development was much more fleshed-out, but the atmosphere that I liked so much in the other book was lacking. I almost feel like if the two books combined there'd be something really great. The pacing was also quite slow. I'm not a huge historical fiction reader, so it may just be that I'm not the target audience, but I do love it when blended with other genres.

First, I'd like to thank NetGalley for the free eArc in exchange for a fair and unbiased opinion.

Setting: Ireland, 1910 and 2010
Characters: Anna, her family, Harold, and the Thornwood Twins
Sarah and a lovely cast of village people, to include Hazel, a teen, and Oran, a widower
Storyline: Anna's Diary regarding Harold and his investigations and story collecting of the little people, the good folk, the faeries
Sarah's destruction and rebuilding, far away from home in a land of strangers

You will be transported to the rural Ireland of a century ago, and to the not quite as rural Ireland of today. You will live in these stories, becoming entwined with the families and the townspeople.

Will it be the best book you've ever read? Probably not. But, does it do its job and transport you, take you away from your world for a little while? Aye, that it does! The magic, the mystery, the history all took me in. I look forward to reading more by Evie!

The Story Collector (2024)
By Evie Woods
One More Chapter (Harper Collins,) 384 pages.
★★

I once attended a talk at Smith College when Kurt Vonnegut was a writer in residence. Students asked him for advice for young writers. He told them that it was important to explain vital things, but cautioned not to over-explain. That advice could have helped The Story Teller.

Evie Woods is the pen name of Evie Gaughan. She lives in Ireland, the setting of The Story Collector, which was originally published in 2018. It's a tale within a tale that jumps between 1910 and 2010. Sarah Harper is about to leave her three-year marriage and take temporary refuge in Boston with her overbearing sister. Sarah drinks too much, staggers onto the wrong plane, falls asleep, and awakes as she is about to land in Shannon. Huh? She didn’t need a passport to fly to Boston and how does a drunken woman make it through customs?

She's a mess and knows it, but decides to stay in Erin to sort out her emotional distress and her lack of future plans. Luckily she encounters a kindly bus driver who helps her get oriented and find a place to stay in Ennis. Everyone is nice to her except widowed conservation office officer Oran Sweeney even though she's a clueless Yank who knows nothing about County Clare. Sarah gets the lowdown about early 19th century Thornwood House and why the motorway mysteriously goes around it. It seems to have something to do with cnoc na sí, the hill of the fairies, though locals only half believe in said supernatural beings. As Sarah settles into the wintry land and walks a lot–how else to secure the wine she guzzles on the sly?–she chances upon an old diary hidden in a tree.

This is the hook for the Wayback chapters that spotlight 18-year-old Anna Butler and her family. The book’s namesake character is Harold Griffin-Krauss, an American reading anthropology for an Oxford PhD on fairy beliefs. He hires Anna to be his regional contact for setting up interviews. The Butlers are reluctant to allow Anna to travel with Harold, but she's bright, responsible, and the farmstead needs the extra money she earns. Harold's a complete gentleman, quite unlike twin siblings George and Olivia Hawley, the rich, privileged heirs to Thornwood House. As it fittingly transpires, Thornwood and the Hawley family are cursed. Do the fairies have a role in that?

It should be noted that story collecting was a real thing. The study of folklore and social anthropology came into their own in the early 20th century. As industrialism, urbanization, and modernism proved transformative, scholars combed the countryside to analyze disappearing traditions. In similar fashion, “song catchers” went into European villages and the Appalachians to trace the origins of folk songs.

Woods employs a forth-and-back [sic] narrative structure that parallels the lives of Sarah and Anna; that is if we broadly interpret trauma, pluck, and confusion about relationships. In both time periods Woods suggests that proper matches are a mix of good fortune and magic. Overall, Anna's tale is much more compelling than Sarah's. Anna is a young woman forced to grow up, whereas Sarah is an adult who struggles/refuses to do so. Though one can sympathize with Sarah’s misfortunes and struggles with the bottle, she's essentially awaiting a rescuing knight in shining armor.

The Story Collector is thus an awkward hybrid that's not quite a slice of Irish life, not quite a romance, and not quite magical realism. This perhaps explains the novel’s uneven tone. In all candor, at times it read like a YA novel. Why do modern-day residents of Ennis act more like Americans than Irishmen? Does anyone need a character explain where the Celtic lands are located? (Surely most contemporary readers could at least name Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.) Aside from stereotypical foodways and fairies, this story could have taken place in the pine barrens where the Jersey devil is said to roam, or in the Pacific Cascades where Bigfoot is alleged to reign.

Tonal shifts and obvious contrivances notwithstanding, The Story Collector is easy reading and has delightful moments. I suspect it will have an audience, but to me it seemed more a treatment for a novel than a finished product.

Rob Weir

This is a unique story about the timeless belief in folklore throughout the Irish community. Evie woods stated, “I wrote this book as a love letter to old Ireland…and folklore.” She definitely delivered with this touch of magic novel that connects the past and present.

Sara is going through a divorce and finds herself taking a plane to Ireland on a whim. Once she is there, she finds a diary from 1911. From that point, Sara begins a journey to uncover secrets from the diary and navigate a new normal for herself.

I love that this book felt heavy on the historical fiction with a little magic and romance on the side. Folklore is so interesting to me and this book really depicts the power of stories and how they remain through generations and communities. Evie Woods also wrote The Last Bookshop. I may need to add that one to my TBR also.

Also, I would like to thank NetGalley and One More Chapter for this Advanced Reader Copy.

I was hooked from page one!!! Sarah and Anna were both very relatable characters I felt like I was going back and forth in time with them

In a Nutshell: A dual-timeline novel containing history, mystery, and magic. The premise of this was perfect for my taste, but the writing approach and the character development didn’t work for me. This is an outlier review.

Plot Preview:
2010. New Yorker Sarah, in a hasty drunken decision after the end of her marriage, cancels her flight to her sister’s place in Boston and lands in Ireland instead. Once sober, she, though horrified, decides to make the best of her time in Ireland and ponder over her next step. But when she discovers a century-old diary, she discovers some unexpected secrets.
A hundred years ago, eighteen-year-old farm girl Anna is thrilled when Harold, a visiting American academician, asks her to be his assistant in speaking with the locals as he is collecting Irish fairy stories for his research project. But as the two of them learn more stories, they discover that real life is much darker and dangerous.
The story comes to us over the two timelines, in the third-person perspective of Sarah for the contemporary timeline and through Anna’s first-person narration in her diary.

Bookish Yays:
😍 The little Irish village and the quaint Irish charm and the magical Irish folklore with the non-Tinkerbell-like fairies. I loved everything connected to the place and the Celtic/Irish lore.
😍 A few of the secondary characters, especially Hazel, were interesting.
😍 The cover art is stunning!

Bookish Mixed Bags:
😐 The prologue is excellent, offering an interesting titbit about Thornwood House. As I love the presence of Gothic houses in historical fiction, I geared up for a fun journey ahead. Imagine my disappointment when I found that the house barely has an active role, and even when it does come up, the focus is more on its two denizens than on creating an atmosphere.
😐 Anna is a confused teen in terms of her romantic feelings. The switcheroo between romantic interest 1 and romantic interest 2 happens almost abruptly and multiple times. Of course, at eighteen, she is expected to be somewhat impulsive, so I can probably ignore this. But I cannot overlook her inaccurate character development. Her knowledge is much more than what a poor Irish farm girl of the early 1900s would have. She’s never heard or seen any American but she knows that Harold has a strong American accent the moment he speaks. Lines such as "It tickled me when he did such American things" are odd when she doesn’t know any other American to know what “American things” are. Another example is how she has no idea what wine is but she recognises champagne immediately. There are too many inconsistencies in her character detailing.
😐 The book is titled ‘The Story Collector’, which, strictly speaking, is Harold. However, he is more of a second lead in the historical timeline and is only referred to briefly in the contemporary timeline. Anna’s role is more prominent in both timelines thanks to her diary being the connector. I guess that Anna, as the story collector’s assistant and translator, could also be called a ‘story collector’, but it would be a stretch.
😐 The plot in both timelines is mostly typical except for the investigation of fairy stories, which is anyway in the background. The main content is more about romance, “feelings”, grief and loss in both timelines, basically more of women’s fiction except for the fantastical parts. The fairy stories are excellent, so I wish there had been a lot more of these.
😐 The link between two timelines is Anna’s diary, which reveals the past fairy mysteries and Harold’s story collection endeavours to the contemporary characters. But other than the fact that Sarah is reading Anna’s diary, there is barely any firm connection between 1910 and 2011. Characters who make an appearance in both timelines are obviously minimal thanks to the time lag, and those who do, do so without any explanation provided. As always, the past timeline is better, but only because of the fairy lore.
😐 I liked the ending for one timeline but not for the other. Can’t tell you which one and why – spoilers.

Bookish Nays:
🙄 This is a huge pet peeve of mine, so maybe it won’t bother other readers. But I absolutely hate it when a “diary” is written more like a novel than like a personal journal. Anna's “diary” is a novel by itself, replete with back-and-forth conversations and needless descriptions. Imagine reading this in a diary: “‘Good morning, Miss!’ he called out […] ‘Good morning,’ I replied.” What diary is written this way? Anna also lists down all the general practices and beliefs of her village, as if she meant to publish her diary for outsiders to read and hence felt the need to include explanations. She even introduces characters as "Tadhg Fox, Tess's father", Were it an actual diary meant only for her eyes, she obviously wouldn’t need to provide details on who Tadhg Fox was. The worst of it was seeing the miscommunication trope come multiple times even in a diary, when one character is about to say something and is immediately interrupted by something else and what he wanted to say is forgotten. All this was very distracting to me, and as half the book comes from Anna’s “diary”, I simply couldn’t enjoy the experience.
🙄 Alcoholic protagonist who denies that she has an alcohol problem – another pet peeve.
🙄 Sarah’s story in the contemporary timeline should have felt more poignant, but ends up as a hodgepodge mess. She is an alcoholic in denial, but she is also grieving over a past tragedy. She is upset about her broken marriage but she doesn’t hesitate to jump into a new relationship. She has a family but they make barely any appearance in the entire story, not even through phone calls. It was a strangely isolated kind of narration, where I felt like Sarah was used mainly so that Anna’s diary could be found. Other than that, Sarah’s story and her timeline has nothing novel. The novel would have worked perfectly even without Sarah’s track.
🙄 As always, the road to a woman’s happiness is through a new romantic relationship, even when the chemistry is barely there. Why can’t happiness for a modern woman come from moving on and taking charge of her life than from having a new man in her life?
🙄 There is unwarranted animal cruelty in the book. I’d have put this only under content warnings had the content been necessary, but that scene was just not required by the core plot. The graphic content could have easily been dialled down, or even removed.
🙄 There is an infodump of an epilogue, with a hurried tie-up of the contemporary timeline and a hasty explanation of what happens in the historical timeline.


I have read this author’s 2023 novel, ‘The Lost Bookshop’, and liked it much better than this one. I remember writing in my review for that book that it will “ work better if you read it with your heart than with your head.” I tried to follow the same advice this time around, but my heart and my head both refused to cooperate, mainly because of the non-diary-like diary, the needless romantic arcs, and the mostly typical storyline.

Mine is very much an outlier review, so it is quite possible that you would enjoy this book more. Please read through the other positive reviews and take a more informed decision.

If I have to recommend this, I’d suggest it to clean romance readers and women’s fiction readers who don’t mind a dash of fantasy.
2 stars, mainly for the fairy lore.

My thanks to Harper 360 for providing the DRC of “The Story Collector” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.

I really enjoyed this story of overcoming grief, told with the beautiful traditions and folklore of Ireland. I loved the dual stories. I was invested in the characters lives. I didn't love all the profanity but was able to put it aside because the book was so interesting.

Not all books have to have action and adventure in order to hit me right where I need it to. This one is one of those.

This book is a cozy, slice of life, book where the main character is trying to find herself after her world turns upside down. Instead of getting on a plane to go home towards her family, she gets on a plane across the pond and finds herself in Ireland and on a new path in life. The land of faerie lore and legends welcomes her in an odd sort of way but she sticks around because, for the moment, she has nothing else going on in her life other than drowning her sorrows in the bottom of a bottle.

When she finds an old diary in a tree near her rented cabin, the diary takes her on a mental journey of discovery and exploration, of faerie lore and loss. I think the one thing I wasn't a huge fan of, was the idea of her finding a new love interest so soon after separating from her husband. Though it seems as though their feelings had been waning for some time, it still seemed she needed time to be on her own and not have the complication of a potential (grumpy sunshine) love interest, and climbing walls with his daughter.

This book made me feel all sorts of feelings but in all of the best kinds of ways.

Stepped outside of my comfort zone with this one. I’m not usually into books with fantastical elements, in this case the fairies. I really enjoyed Anna and Harold’s story, but I was sad with their ending. Sarahs story was interesting but could have used a little more excitement. The fairy elements didn’t really appeal to me, but I can see how they would be interesting to someone with that interest. The historical fiction aspect was enough for me to give this three stars, but it’s not a book I would shout from the rooftops for everyone to read.

The Story Collector is a good afternoon's read and Evie Woods does do the two-timelines well, but if the "modern" story were stand-alone it wouldn't stand well.

Sarah was struggling with every aspect of her life. Instead of going home for Christmas she decided (in the airport 😱) to go to Ireland instead. She found a journal of a young girl who lived 100 years previously. Both timelines are playing out at the same time.

It has some magical realism aspects. The ending was not as happy as I wish it would have been but I think that was the point of the story.

#bookstagram #bookstagrammer #booksmakeusbetter #irelandbook #historicalfictionbooks #historicalfictionlover #historicalfictionreader #netgalley #netgalleyarc #netgalleyarcs #arc #thestorycollector

Thank you NetGalley and Evie Woods for the ARC of The Story Collector! I was so excited to get into this story after The Lost Bookshop!! It was a beautifully written book and it lived up to the hype of the first, it just took a little bit to pick up but once it did I FLEW through the pages!!

I had an ARC of this book from NetGalley and it hooked me fast. I’ve always been drawn to books set in Ireland. The premise is the narrator is almost starting a new life more or less. She ends up in Ireland and is wrapped up in friendly people and history and fairies. It’s really well done. The author’s gift for description made me feel as though as was there and I loved to two parallel time periods. The one ending was different than anything I’ve read in another book and after a few days of thinking about it, I’m ok with it, I just needed to process that it wasn’t ending as I wanted it thought, but not all endings are perfect and it’s good to see that in a book, or better yet not everyone’s happy choice is the same as someone else’s. I will definitely be reading her other book.

Thank you for the ARC! I wanted to read this book because I had read The Lost Bookshop previously. The Story Collector, in my opinion, turned out to be pretty close in ratings for me. It took me a moment to get into the story, but once I did, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Thank you #netgalley

Evie Woods' *The Story Collector* is an emotionally resonant novel intertwining historical fiction and magical realism. Set in both 1910 Ireland and present-day New York, it follows Sarah, who escapes her troubled life to uncover local legends, and Anna, a farm girl entangled with an American anthropologist. Readers praise the book for its relatable characters, enchanting writing, and rich descriptions of folklore, making it both captivating and comforting. The dual timelines enhance the narrative's depth, blending the ordinary with the extraordinary, and leaving a lasting impression on its audience.

I love the author's elegant lyrical writing in this book. She captures the readers imagination and takes us on atmospheric journey to Ireland through different times periods that are each in their own exciting and emotional. This book is engaging and beautiful. Thank you to the publisher and to Net Galley and for the opportunity. My review opinion is my own.

I loved the main character Sarah who on a whim at a airport boards a plane for Ireland . She has suffered the loss of her marriage , her home and was dreading the holidays with her family. She lands into a unknown city and so begins her grand adventure and life of independence. She finds kindness through a inn keeper who takes her to the perfect cottage rental where she can heal and explore the countryside. In a early morning panic attack she walks in the dark to a wooded area and finds a diary hidden in a tree trunk. The diary is the story of a young girl from another time and her journey into fairy lore with a scholar researcher. Anna explores with him the history and local lore of fairies and in doing so she expands her world and her independence.

A wonderful read that I read in one day. It is a book that engages you from beginning to ending. Give yourself the gift of Ireland in different time periods and embrace this wonderful book for all that it offers the reader. I look forward to further works by the author.

I will be going to Ireland in October, and this was a great book to get me in the mood. “The Story Collector” by Evie Wood is a quick read, but you need to suspend some disbelief while reading the book, it is about fairies after all. I was able to get past what happens regarding the plot e.g. how Anna arrives in Ireland, how she finds what she finds, etc. Additionally, the “diary” is written more as a novel. However, the story is a quick read where you will want to continue reading to find out what happens and what happened. If you are looking for a fun, quick read that will transport you to Ireland the land of fairies you won’t do better than Wood’s book. Highly recommend.

I found this book to be just OK, which is unfortunate. I had such high expectations. The pacing was kind of slow and it didn’t really pick up until about 60% in. There were several characters that I wish had a bit more backstory. Having the ending that we want isn’t realistic, but I would have liked to have something that felt final. Although, technically given, the ending still felt empty.

The Story Collector is two parallel stories. Sarah heads home to Boston for the holidays but doesn't want to deal with the incriminating looks and feels from her family. When she comes to after a drunken binge, she finds herself landing in Ireland. She finds a diary from 100 years ago that details Anna's exploits in helping Harold research faeries. Both Sarah and Anna are on a journey to find themselves. Central to both journeys is Irish folklore and the persistent belief in faeries.