I read The Last Bookstore on Earth and here are my thoughts

 

Hello, so today I am talking about yet another book that I had no idea even existed until I saw it on the shelf in the shop that I got it from. And the bookshop I got it from? Yep, Gay’s the Word down in London again. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something about just knowing where a queer bookshop is in London that’s easily accessible. Some place that I know I can easily get to and not be forced onto the overground to get to. Or, with the case of the ones more local to me – I say local, like they’re not an hour’s journey away – that have both moved in their respective cities and now I have no idea where they are.

Anyway, the blurb says that it’s been a year since a devastating storm ripped Liz’s world apart. Haunted by the memories of those she couldn’t save, Liz holes up in the only place she felt safe before her world fell away: the bookstore where she used to work. Now she spends her days trading books for supplies and collecting stories from the remaining survivors who pass by. Until she learns that another earth-shattering storm is coming… and everything changes. Enter Maeve, a spiky out-of-towner who breaks into the bookstore one night looking for shelter. Soon the pair find themselves fighting for their lives and asking themselves one big question. Can love save them all?

So Liz lives in this bookstore, shocker. Who could have seen that coming? The world has also ended. In this version of the end of the world, there’s acidic rain, not sure if it’s all rain, but Liz has scars on her arm from when she got rained on. Then this man, she calls him Peacoat Man, comes into store and trades her some batteries for a book and mentions to her that The Storm is coming again, and Liz isn’t entirely sure she can survive it in the store a second time. Eventually, Maeve breaks in, but both her and Liz aren’t exactly strong enough to cause any proper damage to each other, despite the fact Liz was going to whack her with a book – diva moves. But Maeve was going to try and rob Liz and stay the night in the bookstore, until she was caught. She then offered her repairing abilities in exchange for being able to stay.

One thing I loved was how small the world was in this book. I know that so often in apocalyptic stories, the characters go on a full journey, go travelling, in order to find safety. But the majority of this book takes place within the bookstore, and that’s what I liked. It showed the end of the world from a different perspective. I know with the majority of the post apocalypse books I’ve read recently. I say recently, it’s not that I’ve read a lot of post apocalypse recently, just the ones that I’ve read in the genre most recently. Either way, the ones I’ve read have all involved some kind of journey that the characters have gone on, or some long trip they have to take, so there’s no like stable setting, and they never stay all that long in one place.

When it came to Liz, since she lived in the bookstore, she would occasionally make reference to apocalyptic books – The Hunger Games and others that I fully do not remember. But I go on The Hunger Games lane because that has a protagonist that, sure, has basic survival skills, but isn’t this super survivor. And I feel like that super survivor kind of person is what you so often see in apocalypse media. I appreciated that Liz just wasn’t that. Liz was just a normal YA protagonist. Like, she was the protagonist of a romance or coming-of-age book. I know that she literally was the protagonist of an apocalypse book, but the way she was, she wasn’t. She’s forced to fight towards the end of the book, and she literally says herself that she’s not ready for combat or trained in any way. And yeah! Love that being its own sentence. But she’s not. She’s literally just a girl. Not in the annoying I’m just a girl kind of way, but in the way she was literally an eighteen-year-old who had managed to survive so far into the apocalypse.

There was definitely a part of me that would have liked to have seen a little bit more of the setting around the bookstore. Liz does spend a little bit of time away from the bookstore – Maeve decides that the two of them need to leave to go on a supply run – and I think that could have been the perfect time to spend some time outside. Both figuratively and literally. Show us a little bit of the setting around the bookstore. It’s mentioned that her home was only about ten blocks from the bookstore. Now, I don’t know how long or big a block is because that’s a concept that doesn’t exist in the UK, but there could have been some space between her house and the bookstore we could have also seen.

I think my biggest thing is that this book was just over 300 pages, and most of the things I found myself wanting after I’d read the book could have been remedied with more content. Like, we’re in the end of the world, we have the time and the space – even if there is a horrible storm coming. For example, the basement of the bookstore is important to the book. Liz mentions that she felt like it was haunted and that she wasn’t really a fan of it. That was the perfect thing that a little bit, even one chapter, could have been spent on. Perhaps she could have had some bad experience with the basement before the storm – especially since you do see chapters from before the storm (which I’ll touch on briefly) – and then we could have seen more of why she thought it was haunted, or thought it felt haunted.

But for the brief touching on the chapters before the storm. To put it bluntly, I liked them. It was a bunch of events that all led up to the first storm that caused what was the apocalypse in this book. I really appreciated that they just showed Liz as a normal girl. I know that she was a normal girl in the apocalyptic sections, but I liked that they ended up explaining why she was the way she was in the present. You saw the state of her family. You saw the fact she was leaving for college, meanwhile her dad was a doomsday prepper that was going to leave for Alaska, and that her mother didn’t believe it all in the slightest. You saw all the big things right up until the rain started in the first storm.

I liked the relationship between Liz and Maeve. But that was just it… I just liked it. It wasn’t ever super-gag-diva-slay-the-boots-house-down-dupree-williams. I think part of that came, once again, with the issue of everything that was going on around them and the short length of the novel. This is going to be a minor spoiler, but Liz gets her hand mangled in a generator attached to the store. So, first of all, she fully would have either died or should have never recovered as well as she did throughout the book – sorry, she just shouldn’t. But with things like Liz getting mangled and the two of them patching up the bookstore together, Liz and Maeve’s relationship just felt like one of those that was birthed due to circumstance. It was the proximity of them being the only one the other had once they began to rely on each other, and that was nice, don’t get me wrong, but that was it. It’s one of those things where there are couples from other books or shows that I’ve just found so much more compelling than these two.

Ultimately, I think the way I started the last paragraph is how I feel about this book overall. I liked it. It was good, and it was nice to read something apocalyptic with a focused setting. I went on Goodreads after I read it, and a chunk of the reviews said that it wasn’t what they were expecting from an apocalypse book. I’m really good at not expecting anything but homosexuality, and that’s where I think I’m winning.

Okay, bye!