Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

The first half of the book is a delight, despite my being unable to quite shake off the suspicion that Jean Perdu as literary apothecary owes rather too much to Joanne Harris’s Vianne Rocher in Chocolat.  The second half was disappointingly ordinary.  The inclusion of a list of literary remedies as end matter was too pretentious by half, with the inclusion of several ‘remedies’ unavailable in translation, simply infuriating. I suppose giving recipes at the end was to allow the book to cash in on success of the current chick lit trend in ‘coffee and cupcake’ love stories, but it just seemed to me to compound the schizophrenic nature of the book.