The Storytellers - Sue Heath - ★★★.¾

AUTHOR: Sue Heath

GENRE: Contemporary Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: August 1, 2025

RATING: 3.75 stars.

In a Nutshell: A contemporary fiction implementing the found family trope in a library setting. Nice range of characters in terms of age and personality. A plot that befits the genre. Story-within-a-story, though the sub-story didn’t work well for me. Overall, good for fans of feel-good fiction.

Plot Preview:

When there’s an inter-library writing competition announced, Hattie, a widow and a regular patron of the library these days, is immediately interested. Contest rules specify that there needs to be a group of four members penning a novella-length work. Librarian Will, newly back in town for a family matter, isn't given a choice; Hattie forces him to join in. Avril, who has some struggles at home and is worried about her future, and Stuart, newly retired and wondering what to do with his time, form the rest of Hattie’s team. Each of them is a relative stranger to each other, and has a secret personal reason to participate, though the others don’t know about it. Can this hodgepodge group pen a worthy story for the competition? You can guess the “what will happen”, but the “how will it happen” is also delightful.

The story comes to us from the third-person perspectives of all four key characters in turn. There is also a story-within-a-story, which is the novella the group writes for the competition.

Some genres such as uplit and romance aren’t about the destination. As they are meant to have HEAs, we already know where they will go. What matters more in such books is the journey. Does it still have some freshness within the predictability? Are the characters caricatures or do they have depth? Does the story inspire all the right emotions? This book does well by these standards.

Bookish Yays:

📚 The four characters who form the writing team. As the oldest, Hattie is bossy and cantankerous, so she might get on your nerves. But she has her positives as well. I especially love how she isn't judgemental about youngsters, as most geriatrics in fiction are. Will, Avril and Stuart comes with their own set of complications, which creates a good blend of present competitiveness and past hurts and future hopes in the plot.

📚 The age range of the characters, going from eighty-seven-year-old Hattie, sixty-something Stuart, thirty-something Will and late-twenties for Avril. Their behaviour and their interactions stay true to their age. It also helps that their personalities are different, and that all of them feel realistic and relatable. I especially enjoyed Stuart’s being considered a young man by Hattie. 😅 Will’s portrayal as a young and humorous librarian was also refreshing.

📚 The found-family trope, thanks to the above four finding new friendships with each other. Three of them actually have a family as well, so it was great to see the plot blend across actual and found family seamlessly.

📚 The library setting – used so well in this book! (Do UK libraries allow so much of eating to be done inside the premises though? 🤔)

📚 Though there are numerous characters, it is very easy to keep them straight as the author never dumps all of them on us at once. The introductory scenes are detailed out nicely.

📚 The neat division of the story across the four characters and their written story. Properly structured and nicely formatted. It might be tricky on audio for newbie listeners, but in the actual book, it works really well.

📚 The approach of the individual characters towards the novella they are writing. I don’t want to go int spoilers for this, but it was amusing to see how each of them nudged their work in a direction of their choice, especially at the start.

📚 Even within the predictability that is a standard of this genre, there is a good amount of unpredictability. Not thriller-type twists, of course. But enough to keep us intrigued.

📚 Despite the tremendous potential for melodrama, the book keep emotions at just the right level.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

📖 This point might not bother readers who enjoy reading romance subplots. But I’m not so fond of repeated mention of “tingles” in a romantic arc. I am not even that fond of romance being introduced in a non-romance book, though I must say that the two characters in this book who find each other deserved happiness.

Bookish Nays:

📕 While I did like the idea of including the competition novella also in the book, I felt like it was overpowering the main story after a point. Thirteen chapters in the book (out of the total of forty-eight chapters including the epilogue) are dedicated to the novella. That’s more than 25% of the book! As I was not too invested in the two characters leading the novella, I lost my interest in these chapters, especially towards the end when every alternate chapter was from the novella and its tone was very different from that of the main novel.

📕 The novella is supposedly written by the four characters individually one chapter at a time, as per contest rules. Yet, all the chapters of the novella sound the same. To make it feel genuine, there should have been some difference in tone or writing style or even vocabulary to let us feel like four characters wrote it, all the more as one of the characters is possibly dyslexic.

📕 The final quarter flips the personalities of several secondary characters. While some of this is expected in this genre, the extent of the turnarounds feels like deliberate misleading. So many confessions and justifications and regrets and outwardly-bad-secretly-good people all of a sudden! Surely some of them could have been kept grey. Not every character needs to be an angel.

Overall, despite the couple of issues I mentioned and despite the little boredom that seeped in when the novella chapters were running, I did enjoy this book. And this is mainly due to the strong lead characters, each of whom held their own appeal. The story gets a bit cheesy at times, but there’s a thin line between cheesy and corny, which this book doesn’t cross IMHO.

This is my second book by Sue Heath, who writes uplit under her own name and romantic comedies under the pseudonym of ‘Zara Stoneley’. Looking back at my feedback of the other novel, ‘The Secret Ingredient’, I see that many points are similar, so the author is surely consistent in her writing. I don’t know if I will ever read Zara Stoneley, but I am definitely in for more by Sue Heath.

Definitely recommended to fans of feel-good fiction. This book, with its strong mix of found family, banter, drama, and sentiments, works as a good palate cleanser in between intense reads.

3.75 stars. (This would have been higher if I had enjoyed the novella more.)

My thanks to HarperCollins UK and One More Chapter for providing the DRC of “The Storytellers” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.