This book was so charming. I loved the setting and the alternating time line. I preferred the timeline from 100 years prior. As a lover of books and stories I enjoyed the idea of the idea of preserving history, stories, beliefs through writing and art. I wish there would have been more to the historical story line in the end. I feel like it abruptly cut off and the resolution was a bit short. All in all a good read.

Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it”.
This book was the equivalent to a cup of warm soup on a cold day. It had just the right amount of whimsy and amazing story telling that it just warmed my soul right up.
When Sarah, newly separated, finds herself at the airport planning on going back to Boston to be with her family she decides on a whim to go instead to Ireland. There she ends up meeting a cast of characters that helps her to heal her heart. She also finds a diary of Anna, a woman who lived in the town early 1900’s that became an assistant to a man researching fairies.

I loved the dual time line and was invested in both Anna and Sarah’s stories. This book was a joy to read and I thank Netgalley and the publishers for allowing me to read an advanced copy.

4 Irish charm stars

This was the perfect one to read while I was on vacation in Ireland. Folk stories, fairies, magic, and great characters filled this one and made for an atmospheric read.

With a dual storyline, I was pulled right into this one. The contemporary storyline features Sarah, an American who has fled to Ireland after trauma at home. She lands in a quiet western Irish village and begins a healing process. She discovers a hidden diary and that’s the perfect segue to the other storyline.

The earlier storyline (by about 100 years) features another young woman, Anna, who helps an American academic research fairy stories. She’s an insider and can get the local Irish to open up to Harold with their stories. As you can intuit from the title, Harold is the story collector.

Harold and Anna talk with various people in the community and spend some time at the local manor. Some of the stories were charming, and some were horrifying as people try to make sense of their world and sometimes believe that magic is to blame for their problems.

I loved the descriptions of the countryside, and I searched for my own fairy Hawthorn tree!

I enjoyed this book, albeit not as much as The Lost Bookshop. It is well written but has unmined potential. I like the premise, although I am not a fan of dual or multi timeline stories, inasmuch as they usually are a bit disruptive to the story. This was not, which is a plus. I always knew who was the focus and in which era. However, I feel as if the character and plot development were a bit superficial and I wanted more and deeper.
3.5 stars

What a lovely story! The dual time storytelling works beautifully here as we follow Sarah and Oran in the present learning about Anna and Harold in the past. There’s some suspension of disbelief needed here as we follow Sarah’s unexpected journey from NYC to Ireland and her discovery of Anna’s diary. However, every good story requires that suspension and it’s not hard to do here. Woods spins a gentle but gripping tale of past small village intrigue with a modern tale of a woman examining her life and wondering how she got so off track. This will appeal to fans of Susanna Kearsley and those who enjoy dual time stories.

Recommended

I received a temporary digital copy of The Story Collector by Evie Woods from NetGalley, One More Chapter and the author in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Sarah Harper finds herself in a small Irish village after a few too many beverages in an airport bound for Boston. While exploring, she finds a diary of a young girl named Anna who assisted an American in collecting stories on fairies. Through the land, time and Anna's story, Sarah begins to heal from a recent experience that landed her in Ireland in the first place.

The Story Collector was a good read on Irish traditions and their folklore. I enjoyed Anna's story much more than Sarah's, but both characters were interesting.

I really enjoyed reading this story. Sarah had gone through a divorce and was supposed to be flying to Boston to stay with her sister. She reads a news story and impulsively decides to fly to Ireland. She does not have any lodging or plans. The story unfolds and she ends up getting the things she needs to end up where she is supposed to be.

She stays in a little cottage and finds a diary. The diary is written by someone who lived 100 years before. This book alternates between the two story lines. It is a great read with just a little hint of fantasy.

What a magical and unexpected read! This book had so many elements that I love: historical fiction, romance, and a touch of the mystical. I loved the interweaving of this cast of characters and the FMC’s journey through grief toward self-discovery.

This book was truly magical and the characters were well written! Thank you to Evie Woods and One More Chapter for this ARC via NetGalley!

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

The premise of this book, Ireland, fairies, history, etc. was really intriguing and I had high hopes for this book. It was a good read and the author did a great job slowly revealing information about the present main chat and the past main character without giving you too much. But, it took a long time for me to get into this book. It didn’t hold my attention as much as I’d hoped. It was a slow read but a good story.

This was a delightfully unexpected gem of a story! I love anything set in Scotland, dual storylines and time lines, and folklore. Both Anna and Sarah's storylines were captivating and endearing. This story was beautifully rendered from the beginning to the end. The perfect light and fun story for the summer!

The story starts at the breakup of Sarah’s marriage when she’s on her way to stay with her sister to get her life back together. At the airport she overdoes the alcohol while she waits for her plane. On a lark, she visits a Celtic gift shop and buys an Irish newspaper. Her eye is caught by a story about protests causing a road to be repositioned to avoid a “fairy tree.” When she opens her eyes next she is in Ireland, apparently changing her plans in her drunken state. She lands in a village and the story takes shape when she finds a hundred year old diary deep in a tree. The story then jumps back and forth between her story and the story written by the diarist. It’s an interesting women’s story that keeps one’s interest.

This is a dual-timeline story that alternates between the two timelines. The book begins with Sarah Harper leaving her husband on Christmas after their marriage implodes. Her plan is to hop on a plane to her sister's house, but she gets drunk at the airport waiting for her plane, changes plans because of an article she read in a newspaper, and wakes up in Ireland, completely bumfuzzled as to how she got there. Her sister is mad at her because she spent the day getting everything ready for her, and her husband has been waiting at the airport for her. Everyone thinks she is having a breakdown, but she assures them she just needs some time away to regroup and think. She decides to do just that and she rests a cottage for a few weeks. At the cottage she discovers a diary from 1910, belonging to someone named Anna. This is where the second timeline comes in at. The diary tells about how Anna, a young farm girl, volunteers to help an intriguing American visitor, Harold Griffin-Krauss, translate 'fairy stories' from Irish to English. They travel around Thornwood Village together, collecting personal accounts of interactions and sightings of the fae. Sarah becomes fascinated by all of the folklore and superstition and decides to start sketching pictures of the fairies in the stories she is reading about.

I love this author's books. She never fails to draw me in and keep me captivated. I loved all of the stories about the fae, and enjoyed the dual timeline and the way the two tied together. When Sarah finally broke down and confessed what had happened to break up her marriage with her husband, I will admit I shed a tear or two for her. Whether you are a fan of fantasy fiction or just love fiction, I think you will love this book regardless. I highly recommend it!

Evie Woods is a phenomenal writer and I loved how this novel was set in two time periods while the story intertwined. A story of dreams, magic and the fairies that hide in the hills of Western Ireland.
Thank you NG for this ARC!

The Story Collector is an interesting dual-timeline novel, with one modern story (set in 2010/2011) and one historical (1910/11). Woods does a good job balancing the two storylines, making sure that each has good supporting characters and enough plot to keep them going. However, the tricky part of dual-storyline novels is that both characters/stories HAVE to be compelling enough you don't mind leaving one for the other, and this is where the Story Collector did not work for me. While the modern story, with Sarah, has an interesting narrative voice and a solid supporting cast (except poor Fee, who is just there for Sarah to trauma-dump on her. Gag.), is painful to get through. I found Sarah as a character whiny and pretentious, and would honestly skim those chapters to get back to Anna's story. I don't want to spoil Sarah's story and why she leaves the US for Ireland, because Woods seems to think it was a climactic reveal, but I can see many women connecting with her story and struggles. I also found her "I have Irish BLOOD and so I'm CONNECTED to the island" such American, pandering crap. The fact that anyone in the story entertains this made me roll my eyes.

All that said, I enjoyed the 1911 storyline with Anna SO much. Her story and thinking were more interesting and richly layered; I wanted to spend more time getting to know turn-of-the-century Ireland, because Woods described it so well and so delightfully. She was really able to capture the nauances of the period and the characters. (which made her writing choices in the other timeline so baffling. Honestly. She's a great writer! Sarah was just not the character for me.) My biggest complaint is that Anna's ending, while realistic and probably more true to the period, does this fantastic character so dirty; she didn't deserve it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper 360 for the ebook ARC. All opinions are mine alone.

The Story Collector is a novel with dual storylines. The novel begins on Christmas Day, 2010, in New York City. Sarah Harper is leaving her husband, Jack. Something tragic has happened between the two, and it has driven them apart. Sarah plans to fly home to Boston. However, while she’s at the airport, she has a bit too much to drink, makes a snap decision with her foggy brain, and finds upon landing, she’s flown to Ireland, not Boston. She gets settled into a cottage and her adventure begins.

She is prone to panic attacks, and her way of coping in NYC was running. Here in the Irish countryside, she copes by talking a walk in the dark, with a bottle as her companion. Events lead her to a deep hollow in a tree, where she finds a box. Once she returns home to her cottage, she finds a diary inside, and that is how the second storyline is introduced. The diary belongs to Anna Butler, and the first entry is on Saint Stephen’s Day (day after Christmas), 1910. The two timelines alternate throughout the novel, healing one broken heart, and breaking another.

At first, I found Sarah Harper a bit irritating, and I think that’s partly because the secret she carries, the one that has driven her and Jack apart, isn’t revealed until later in the novel. Without knowing why Sarah is the way she is, she initially came across, to me anyway, as a self-absorbed, possibly alcoholic, character. Anna, on the other hand, was very much a likable Irish girl, even if her head was too easily turned by the local wealthy landowner’s son. But as the story progressed, I found my opinion of Sarah changing, as she begins to show another side away from those who know her well. In Ireland, she’s free to rewrite her story, the way others see her, and how she sees herself.

Irish folklore is the foundation for this story. Sarah is drawn to Ireland after reading a newspaper story about how locals had forced a major roadway to be built in order to preserve an old hawthorn tree. Hawthorn trees are important to the Irish and fairy stories associated with them. During her visit, she becomes friends with her landlord’s granddaughter, a teenager drawn to the stories of fairies and Irish folklore.

Anna, the 1910 character, is very much a believer in the world of fairies and their ways. After milking the family cow, she lets a drop of milk splash onto the ground for the Good People. So when an American, Harold Griffin-Kraus, shows up at their cottage with two flat bike tires, she finds herself with a job. Harold is a scholar. He’s an anthropology student at Oxford, and for his thesis, he’s traveling Ireland collecting stories to see if the fairy faith is still alive. He needs someone to introduce him to the locals willing to tell him their tales. Harold and the reader are both exposed to the stories of the Good People, tales both good and bad. Anna has her own fairy story, but she is reluctant to tell it to Harold, because she doesn’t trust him with it.

Trust and betrayal are the issues at the core of this novel. Woods does a fantastic job of interweaving the stories of these two women, a hundred years apart.

If Irish folklore, magical realism/fantasy, and/or historical fiction interest you, give The Story Collector a try. I’m glad I did.

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper 360 for an e-copy of the book. All opinions are my own.

This is an interesting story. It shifts back and forth between the past and present. Sarah is at the end of her rope. She has left her husband and is heading home. But, instead of heading home, she ends up in Ireland. She just needs some time to herself to get it together. While there, she finds the diary of a young girl named Anna from 100 years ago. As Sarah gets into Anna's story, she finds pieces of herself. A moving story of resilience and love.

I wish I could say I loved this book, but I didn't. There are two stories here, 100 years apart. Sarah, going through a divorce, goes to the airport to fly home to Boston to move in with her sister. But she somehow after already checking in at the airport winds up on a flight to Ireland, because she got plastered out of her mind and somehow talked her way onto an international flight. Seriously? This does not happen. Not even close. And I really hate when stupid things like this are written in a novel. Find another way to get her to Ireland. Also she spends at least half the book getting raging drunk, so my she's a flaming alcoholic vibes were going off. The first half of the book she drinks, A LOT. And then just suddenly stops. I can't see that happening that way. Given how much she drinks, she'd have some serious detox if she went cold turkey. Also, apparently she only has a (small?) carryon bag, so where did her suitcase go? Or did she not have one and only had a small carry on? I'm confused, because she spends weeks in Ireland and apparently has no issue with having a ton of clothes. The whole Sarah storyline simply didn't work for me, and these logical inconsistencies were just a part of it. She just felt too whiny to me. Also, and this may be a little picky, but as someone who crochets, the constant mixing up of knitting and crochet (they are not the same thing!) was really annoying.

However, there is another story here, once that I loved. While out on a walk, Sarah finds a century old diary of a young girl, Anna, who lived in the cottage where Sarah is staying. Sarah reads Anna's diary, and we learn the story of Anna and Harold, a young American scholar who is researching the oral fairy traditions in the Celtic lands. Anna becomes his assistant, and this is the story that I wish was just what the novel was. This part was charming, and had such a wonderful feel of place and character. This is the part that is worth reading this book for.

I didn't particularly like the ending for either Anna or Sarah, but with Anna, I could see her ending being the most reasonable. I did feel however it came too quickly and ended up being a short info dump. I honestly wish Anna's story had been fleshed out more.

Thank you NetGalley for the advanced reader copy of The Story Collector by Evie Woods. I had my ups and downs with this book, but I am so glad I kept on reading. The main characters were very likable. I normally don't enjoy when books flip around from past to present, but this was done tastefully and wove it together seamlessly. My only criticism was I wish the ending included what happened between two people in particular. I recommend reading this book.

I was really interested in reading this story based on the description - I love dual timelines. This one takes place in 1911 and 2011. I was fully engrossed in the 1911 story. Anna was such an engaging character and I couldn't wait for her parts of the book. Sarah's timeline in 2011 was not as strong in my opinion. I just couldn't connect with her at all, and the romance aspect was actually my least favorite part because it just didn't seem likely in the story. I felt like we needed more details, but it was Anna's story that I wanted more of!

I loved the Irish folklore and loved the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality.

Thank you to NetGalley, Evie Woods, and Harper 360 for the opportunity to read in this book in exchange for my honest opinions.