The Vanishing Bookstore - Helen Phifer - ★★★

AUTHOR: Helen Phifer

GENRE: Contemporary Fantasy

PUBLICATION DATE: January 7, 2025

RATING: 3 stars.

In a Nutshell: A contemporary fantasy about facing your fears to reach a happy ending. Interesting characters and plot, but somewhat YA in approach. The magic had potential but the logical loopholes were distracting. The titular bookstore is not the central part of the story. You might like the book better if you take off your thinking cap before reading.

Plot Preview:

Present day, London. Thirty-three-year-old Dora English, a florist, is stunned when her aunt plans a trip to Salem to visit their family. Dora always assumed that the two of them had only each other. Now, she discovers that even her mother, whom she had presumed dead, is alive. But the reunion isn’t a happy one. Dora discovers that her family has been hiding certain secrets from her. The most shocking one is that their survival hinges on finding a bookstore that no one in the family has seen for generations. Now Dora has to do whatever she can to keep her family alive and together.

The story comes to us in the limited third-person perspective of various characters over multiple timelines.

Author Helen Phifer is a proficient writer of crime thrillers, police procedurals, and horror. This is her first foray into fantasy. While this book shows glimpses of her talent on the thriller side, the fantasy part could have been finetuned.

Bookish Yays:

🔮 The prologue coming from Salem in 1692, which establishes the foundation for the contemporary events excellently.

🔮 Lucine, Seraphina and Lenora – three sisters with distinct personalities that stay true throughout the plot. I loved how well their character sketching was done. Lenora was my favourite of the trio.

🔮 The male characters. One was a bit too sugary-sweet, but the plot needed that reliable vibe. The antagonist was perfectly creepy!

🔮 Quite a few third-person perspectives but never confusing. Each contains a good mix of thought and plot. I like how well this narrative choice was used. (Those who don’t like multiple character voices might find it bothersome.)

🔮 The portrayal of Salem, both historical and contemporary, is brilliant. Not only is the setting used well in the plot, but it also highlights the insensitivity displayed by those indulging in dark tourism.

🔮 The two non-human characters - Hades and Ophelia. Both were so good! I wish there had been more of Ophelia, but Hades more than made up for it with his *chirpy* personality.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

💫 The pacing gets a bit slow and repetitive in between, but the ending saves the overall average tempo.

💫 There are two threads of suspense. The bookstore one is a bit meh but the character-connected one is intriguing, even if it is more about “how” than “who”.

💫 The romance was a bit too much for my liking. But it doesn’t overpower the core plot especially in the crucial scenes, which is always good.

💫 Two interesting female supporting characters have a good role to play in the initial few chapters. But they are forgotten after a certain point. I’d have loved to know more about their fate later in the story.

💫 I don't want to go into spoilers, so all I'll say about the magical elements is: quite strong in many scenes, needed more detailing in the rest.

💫 There are a couple of chilling scenes but these occur only in the background. We don’t get to see the action on page. This is especially disappointing considering the oeuvre of the author. Her experience in writing crime thrillers shows even in the limited content, so I wish those scenes had more on-page elaboration. This would have been easily possible thanks to the multi-character third-person approach.

Bookish Nays:

🧹 The title – very misleading and totally wrong for the book. The bookstore hardly has any page space. Most of the story is more about Dora and her family and their problems than about the bookstore itself. More importantly, the word “vanishing’ makes it sound like the bookstore appears and disappears regularly throughout the story. Inaccurate!

🧹 Dora's age isn't revealed until well into the second half so it came as a big shock to me that she was in her thirties. She feels too naive for her age, giving the book somewhat YA feels.

🧹 The dialogues are somewhat cheesy at times, further enhancing the YA vibe.

🧹 Quite a few logical loopholes and unanswered queries connected to the fantasy part of the plot.

🧹 I didn’t get the epilogue despite reading it twice! 🤔

🧹 A pedantic complaint, this. But I was peeved by the repeated use of the phrase "the English women". Dora’s family was “English” by name, not by nationality or language. So this recurring method of referring to them created quite some confusion in my head in the initial chapters.

🧹 Another pedantic complaint: There were way too many sorrys and pleases and thank yous in the dialogues. Even when there were no magic words needed and the action was quite high, the characters stopped to exchange such pleasantries. C’mon!

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at 8 hrs 12 min, is narrated by Stephanie Cannon. Her voice is very sweet and her enunciation is clear, I give you that. But its dainty timbre doesn’t suit the older characters. Dora’s family is mostly in their sixties, but they sound like they are in their twenties thanks to the narrator’s mellifluous voice. At times, the dialogues require aggressive emotions such as yelling, but her voice stays the same in tone and volume. I think she would make a great narrator for a light romcom or a MG/YA book, but she was not the best choice for this dark-ish story with character perspectives from varied age groups.

The story comes from multiple timelines and characters. The third-person makes character identification easy, but the timeline could be somewhat confusing. So the audiobook isn’t recommendable to audio newbies.

There have been a plethora of titles in the last few years referencing a “lost” book-related idea, one of which was the similar-sounding Evie Woods’ “The Lost Bookshop”. It had been a decent novel, and I was hoping for similar magical vibes from this one. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be.

To be clear, this is not a bad book, but it doesn’t fulfil its promise. By leaving many things unexplained and restricting the bookstore to a minimal appearance, the book kept me from reaching greater satisfaction. However, if you can go with the flow and not question anything too much, you might still enjoy this story, especially for its characters.

Recommended to those who enjoy contemporary fantasy with multiple character perspectives, as long as you remember that the bookstore is not the focus of the plot.

3 stars, as my feedback is mostly balanced across the three sections.

My thanks to Bookouture for providing the DRC and ALC of “The Vanishing Bookstore” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.