Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew J. Sullivan

There weren’t enough of the trappings of a traditional mystery novel for me to consider this a mystery, and not enough emotion expressed for me to consider it chick-lit. There was a tinge of “Hey, so you’ve been friend-zoned? Hang in there, and sooner or later, she’ll come around and see that you’re the man of her dreams” vibe there that bothered me. Is it because she couldn’t be mad at him for knowing she was Little Lydia, because he always knew? And every other man in the universe would probably find out sooner or later, thus earning her disdain? Seems like thin ground for an adult relationship. I don’t know how to feel about Lydia and Raj ending up together at the end. After I finished reading, I decided that wasn’t surprising, since she was simply the intersection of the two colliding stories of infidelity- not a main character so much as a narrator. Lydia was a sympathetic enough character, but she never came alive for me.

Yes, the library scenes were from 20 years ago, but the nineties were not the Dark Ages, and I’m pretty sure you couldn’t just stumble into a job as a branch manager for the Denver Public Library sans library degree or any kind of experience. I kept thinking about that bit all through this novel, because I couldn’t get past the wildly inaccurate portrayal of public libraries and librarians, no matter how irrelevant that was to the plot. In the second-ever episode of Late Night with David Letterman, a Manhattan dentist reviewed the movie Reds strictly on the basis of whether the teeth of the actors accurately reflected the time period portrayed.

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew J. Sullivan