Angieville

I am almost always up for a sequel. You know this about me. But you also know how there are just some books that are so right a sequel doesn't even enter your head? And it's not necessarily even that things are tied up neatly at the end, it's that the book as a singular entity is . . . whole. On a fundamental level. That is how I felt about The Cafe by the Sea . I finished it completely happy with the world and completely unaware that a sequel was not only in the works, but had already been published just a few short weeks prior. And it's not that I didn't immediately hightail it to the bookstore the moment I found out (because I did), it's that every footstep was laced with fear. Because a sequel meant the potential for a great deal of pain. A sequel meant . . . things could go horribly wrong and, because I loved these characters so very much, I would have to sit by and witness it. But enough about my neuroses. On to the tale! A word of warning: Beyond thi...

I was not expecting this. I was simply not expecting just what was to come when I picked up this deceptively pleasant-looking novel. My mom gifted me a copy of Jenny Colgan 's The Café by the Sea awhile ago, but it took until the other night while I was browsing my shelves after starting and stopping no fewer than four different books for me to snatch it up off my TBR shelf and give it a go. And I'm not remotely ashamed to say that I didn't even make it past the epigraph before falling hopelessly and irretrievably in love. The epigraph read: hiraeth (n): a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost places in your past Tears filled my eyes. I cannot tell you how frequently I experience that emotion as an adult, how complicated and full (and yes, very often painful) it has been trying to accommodate it, and just how very much it meant to me, knowing that there is a word out there that ...