Bloomsbury Girls Review (Audiobook)

Book: Bloomsbury Girls

Author: Natalie Jenner

Narrator: Juliet Stevenson

BECHDEL TEST: PASS-Vivian and Grace talk about their work in the shop.

Content Warnings: Misogyny, domestic abuse, racism, sexism, xenophobia, emotional abuse, homophobia, panic attacks/disorders, physical abuse, racial slurs, medical content

We got here! Finally in April, having caught up on all my outstanding 2022 books, I can actually write about a book I read in 2023. I know, it’s astonishing! I am hoping from here on out that I will be able to keep up a more regular schedule with these reviews and have them up within a reasonable time of finishing the books (though to be fair, I finished this one in March, so it’s really not all that late) but I have said that every year for the past few years and every single time I’ve ended up behind on my reviews so who knows! This book was one that caught my eye last year (actually when I was interviewing for a job with the publisher, which I didn’t end up getting but I did get a book recommendation out of it, so not a total loss!) and I finally got around to it in January. Sadly despite the book sounding very up my alley (post-war era, feminism, books), I didn’t end up enjoying it as much as I hoped I would. I liked the characters and the setting, but the plot was incredibly SLOW and it took me so long to really get into the story. I found in the end that I liked the idea of the book more than the actual execution. Here is a synopsis of the book:

Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager’s unbreakable fifty-one rules. But in 1950, the world is changing, especially the world of books and publishing, and at Bloomsbury Books, the girls in the shop have plans:

Vivien Lowry: Single since her aristocratic fiance was killed in action during World War II, the brilliant and stylish Vivien has a long list of grievances – most of them well justified and the biggest of which is Alec McDonough, the Head of Fiction.

Grace Perkins: Married with two sons, she’s been working to support the family following her husband’s breakdown in the aftermath of the war. Torn between duty to her family and dreams of her own.

Evie Stone: In the first class of female students from Cambridge permitted to earn a degree, Evie was denied an academic position in favor of her less accomplished male rival. Now she’s working at Bloomsbury Books while she plans to remake her own future.

As they interact with various literary figures of the time – Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (widow of George Orwell), Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and others – these three women with their complex web of relationships, goals and dreams are all working to plot out a future that is richer and more rewarding than anything society will allow.

I have to start with my biggest problem with this book, which I mentioned at the top of this review, once again, it’s our old friend: PACING. This book is incredibly slow moving, we spend a good portion of the first part of the book setting up the characters and backstory, and it took ages for anything to really happen, which made the book feel a good deal longer than it actually was (the audiobook is around 12 1/2 hours which is about standard really for the audiobooks I generally listen to). I do understand dedicating some time to establishing characters and setting but I’d got about halfway through the book and it still felt like I was listening to set-up, which is where I have a problem. It also meant that when we finally did get to the exciting part of the book, the big event, it felt somewhat rushed over because we had spent so long building up to it and it was like the author suddenly realised she only had a certain amount of time left before she got to the endpoint and so rushed towards that. As a reader, it felt like we missed out on fully exploring the big event of the book because we had spent so long on the build up. I think if Jenner had trimmed the character introductions slightly and moved into the main event of the book earlier (Grace, Vivian and Evie working together to take control of the bookshop from the men), then the pacing would have been better and it would have made for a more enjoyable read.

I did enjoy the main female characters, I thought Vivian, Evie and Grace were all well-rounded and nuanced characters and I felt invested in them, even when the plot of the book wasn’t always engaging me. I particularly liked Grace and her journey to escaping her abusive marriage, and I kind of wish the story had highlighted her a little more as it seemed like Vivian and Evie got more of the page time. I also loved that Grace was a more mature woman as women in their 40s are definitely not seen enough in fiction, and intergenerational relationships between female characters are equally rare, so that was nice to see.

The book is also filled with the various male characters that the women work with in the shop and I felt like they were developed to a lesser extent, I felt like I got a good sense of who Lord Baskin (the owner of the shop was) and Ash was fairly well developed, but Alec, Mr Dutton and Frank felt somewhat less so. Honestly, I didn’t really feel like the POVs from the male characters were particularly necessary, I didn’t find they added all that much to the story (other than I guess giving those characters’ views of the women of the shop), and considering that the book is meant to be about the women, whenever the POV jumped to one of the male characters, I found myself wanting to go back to Vivian, Evie or Grace because I was more interested in them. There are quite a lot of characters in this book anyway and I felt like if Jenner had narrowed the focus of her POVs to just the three women, they would have been easier to keep track of.

I have to admit, the title of this book did annoy me somewhat: the three main characters in this are women, not girls, even the youngest, Evie is 20 years old and Grace is around 40 or so, so none of them are girls! I know it’s got nothing particularly to do with the content of the book, and Bloomsbury Girls probably rolls off the tongue better than “Bloomsbury Women” but it is annoying that publishers always seem to reduce mature women to girls in their titles. I honestly feel like “Bloomsbury Books” would have been a better title for this book because the title for me implied that the book would solely be from the point of view of the three women, and it isn’t, it’s more about the bookshop itself and the way the women drive change there.

This is a companion novel of sorts to Jenner’s debut, The Jane Austen Society, as Evie was a character from that book and this continues her journey and many other characters from that book also make an appearance here. I wouldn’t call it a direct sequel though, as it mostly follows new characters and you don’t need to have read The Jane Austen Society to understand this one as the characters from that book are reintroduced here and their connections are explained clearly for those who haven’t read The Jane Austen Society.

Juliet Stevenson was an okay narrator but I wasn’t always completely sold on her accents for the different characters and I wouldn’t say her performance engaged me with the novel more than I would have been if I read the physical book. If I’m listening to an audiobook, I want to feel like I’m getting something that enhances my experience versus if I had read the physical book, that really feels as if the characters and their personalities come to life and I didn’t feel like I got that here. However, I will say that I wasn’t mad about the writing and I found Jenner’s prose itself somewhat dull and not particularly engaging, so Juliet Stevenson’s performance may not have been completely at fault there. In terms of Jenner’s writing there were also quite a few Americanisms in this that didn’t really fit with the British setting (for example using “Fall” for “Autumn”) though I do realise the author is Canadian so perhaps that is why.

There is some attempt at diversity with a major character who is Indian (Ash) and an exploration of his experiences of overt racism in London society in the 1950s and there are also some LGBTQ+ characters, most particularly two bookshop employees who have to hide their relationship due to to it being illegal at the time, so in terms of diversity, it does do better than many historical fiction books I have read covering this time period, but the cast is still on the whole majority white.

The chapters were generally fairly short, most were less than 30 minutes which is what I prefer and definitely helped offset some of the pacing issues of the plot as I was able to get through several chapters at a time (though it did not completely balance out the pacing issues).

I liked that each chapter started with one of Mr Dutton’s infamous 51 rules (he has 51 rules regarding how the shop is run) and would show the characters breaking that rule within the narrative of that chapter, I thought that was really clever.

It did take an awfully long time before the three women’s stories really converged, Grace and Vivian were reasonably connected throughout the book but it did feel like Evie was sort of floating off on her own for most of the book and their narratives all felt fairly separate for most of the book. I would have liked to have seen them come together sooner and to have seen more of a friendship build between the three: one of the things I was most excited for in this book was the female friendship and camaraderie and I didn’t feel like I really got much of that, even Grace and Vivian who have been working together for a while and are ostensibly friends, felt more like cordial work colleagues than genuine friends and the three women seemed to come together because they had to in order to achieve their goals than through any kind of friendship which somewhat disappointed me as I was expecting a real friendship to form between the three, it would have been nice if Jenner had devoted more time to building that, instead of building their entanglements with the various men of the shop.

Speaking of the entanglements with the various men of the shop, each female character has a love interest (because OF COURSE THEY DO. MUST WE ALWAYS HAVE EVERY FEMALE CHARACTER IN A BOOK INVOLVED IN SOME SORT OF ROMANCE?) I know this always irks me, but it irked me even more here because I did feel like the romantic elements took up space that could have been dedicated to building the friendship between Grace, Vivian and Evie which I was far more interested in than their various relationships between the men of the shop.

As for the romances themselves (besides my frustration about romance being ever-pervasive), I had mixed feelings about them. My least favourite was definitely Vivian and Alec, I know everyone loves an enemies to lovers romance, and I do too sometimes (although these two are kind of enemies because they were lovers so I guess slightly different) but I could not get on board with these two. They’re far too similar, in a really bad way, and they barely even seem to like each other, they just enjoy having sex with each other. Now that’s fine, you do you, as long as it’s between two consenting adults, but enjoying having sex doesn’t necessarily make you a good couple and it was quite clear to me that Vivian and Alec would never be able to have a healthy relationship so I couldn’t really get invested in them as a couple. I was quite glad that their story ended the way it did because I think that was the best fit for them both as characters. We do get quite a few sex scenes from this pair, but they are not at all graphic and are mainly based in the aftermath of the act (if like me, you don’t much like reading graphic sex scenes).

Then we have Evie and Ash. I could understand what they both saw in each other, their personalities matched quite well (where Vivian and Alec are similar in bad way, these two are similar in a good way) but Ash just felt way too old for her! I don’t know if that was Evie maybe reading younger than she was meant to (I mean she’s about 20, so she’s still quite young anyway) or if Ash was meant to read younger than he did, but for me, he seemed a good decade or so older than she was which made their whole romance feel a little icky for me (personally! Again, they’re both consenting adults, so you do you even if I personally find it a bit weird).

Of the three main romances, I found Grace and Lord Baskin’s the most believable (though ironically, the least happens between them because Grace is married and both are far too respectful of that to make a move but the feelings between them are clear). They seemed to have the most genuine chemistry and affection between them, and it was nice to see Grace being treated well after everything she goes through with her abusive husband. They’re also the closest in age so they both feel like they’re at the same stage in life in a way that Evie and Ash don’t.

There are quite a lot of references to classic authors and fiction, which I did mostly get as I know enough about classic literature and publishing to understand who people like Daphne Du Maurier and Samuel Beckett are, though I have to admit, Peggy Guggenheim was fairly lost on me (I’ve heard of the Guggenheim museum so I knew of the family but I don’t know much about the women herself). But be warned if you’re not in to famous name dropping then there is a fair amount of that in this book. It’s certainly very convenient that all these famous literati would be interested in a small bookshop in London & in particular Grace, Vivian and Evie and it does stretch belief somewhat that all these famous women are willing to help them when they don’t really know each other that well (but then I do like women supporting women so it’s not really a huge issue).

It was fairly predictable how things were going to turn out, there weren’t really many big surprises. I was hoping for a bit more drama with the women taking over the store (not a spoiler, it’s clear from very early on that this is what they are going to do), like Mr Dutton and Frank fighting them on it, it would have made things more interesting if things had gone less smoothly for the women.

I had no idea that the book Evie is trying to find throughout the course of the novel, The Mummy, is actually a real book and its writer Jane Webb was also real, I assumed that was something Jenner made up for the plot, so when I googled it and found out it was real, I was pleasantly surprised as I’d never heard of either Webb or The Mummy before!

I actually walked down Lamb’s Conduit whilst I was listening to this as I was going to a book event in Holborn, so that was quite cool to be walking down the street that shop was based in (it is a fictional shop, so no, you cannot find the real Bloomsbury Books & Maps!).

Honestly if I was recommending a bookshop book set in a similar era (though during WWII rather than post-war), I would recommend The Last Bookshop In London by Madeline Martin over this one, it has the same cosy bookshop vibes but I felt like I got a better sense of shop in that one more (and it was a shop I felt like I would want to visit) and I enjoyed the plot a lot more.

The ending of the book was satisfying, but ultimately felt somewhat rushed because of how long the build-up took, so it did feel a little abrupt when the book ended.

I’m not sure I’d read The Jane Austen Society by the same author because of the three women, I think Evie was the least compelling for me. But I am somewhat interested by Jenner’s next novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye because it follows Vivian who I really liked in this book (though I do hope she does a book about what Grace does next at some point because I did love her the most) & it’s set in 1950s Italy which is a setting I’ve never read about before so despite not completely loving this one, I still might read her next one.

Overall, Bloomsbury Girls was a good concept and it had potential but the execution just didn’t quite live up to the idea. I enjoyed the characters, but the pacing of the plot ended up dragging down what could have been a very good book, and I do wish that the book had focused more on the friendship between the three women, like I thought it was going to, than their various romantic entanglements which just didn’t really interest me. Hopefully if I do read Jenner’s next book, it will be a more enjoyable read for me than this one.

My Rating: 3/5

My next review will be of my most recent read (yes we have finally caught up with where I’m actually at with my reading), I’ll be talking about The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. I finished this one a couple of weeks ago, so my review should be up fairly shortly, though I’m quite busy next week so it will possibly be the week after!