ARC Review: The Book Swap by Tessa Bickers

“A love letter to books and reading. This debut is catnip for any book geek. I just loved it.” —Cesca Major, author of Maybe Next Time, a Reese’s Book Club Pick

A story of second chances and new beginnings, this is a love letter to books—and a love letter to life

Still reeling from a recent tragedy, Erin Connolly knows she needs to start living, but has no idea how. When she accidentally donates her favorite book—a heavily annotated copy of To Kill a Mockingbird containing a memento she can’t be without—to a local little community library, she’s devastated. But then the book turns up a week later, back in the library with fresh notes in the margins, along with an invitation in a copy of Great Expectations to meet her newfound pen pal.

A life-changing conversation, written only in the margins of beloved classic books, begins between Erin and her Mystery Man. Following each other through the pages of their favorite novels as the book exchange continues, they both begin to open up, falling into a friendship…and maybe something more.

But Erin and her pen pal have a shared history that neither of them has guessed. Faced with painful reminders of the past—and the one person she swore never to forgive—Erin finds herself at a crossroads. One that could change her life forever.

A book-lovers dream! References to the following classics can be found in The Book Swap:
• TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
• GREAT EXPECTATIONS
• WUTHERING HEIGHTS
• MANSFIELD PARK
• THE GREAT GATSBY
• MIDDLEMARCH
• BELOVED
• ON THE ROAD
• THE BELL JAR

Title: The Book Swap

Author: Tessa Bickers

Publisher: Harlequin Trade Publishing/Graydon House

Expected Publication Date: September 3, 2024

Review:

Thank you to Harlequin Trade Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with an egalley of this debut book to read and give an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.

I adore a book about books. And this one promised some fun with a kind of You've Got Mail  or Sleepless in Seattle theme to it. I was exicted to jump in and meet the characters and see how their story progressed.

The guts of the book have great promise. Unfortunately, the execution was far from good.

The character development is subpar. The FMC was very self-absorbed. I could see the possibility of growth for this character. I can see how her tragic past may have shaped her. But overall she doesn't grow. It's not until the very end that we see any empathy from her towards the other characters in the book. I did enjoy the MMC. He has a hard background fraught with mental health issues in his family. I would have liked to see more depth with this. Mental health is so important and I feel like the author truly needed to do more research in the area of Bipolar in order to really represent it appropriately. Even the side characters are not all that interesting and I had no real idea of who they were. I could not connect with anyone in the story.

As for the romance, it is truly slow burn. And it takes place within the pages of books, which was kind of neat. The two main characters annotate and leave information in the margins and at the backs of the books in order to communicate and get to know each other. I love the idea of that exchange taking place within a free little library but did find it rather unbelievable that the books would remain in the library and allow the characters to exchange them that way. I have many free little libraries where I live and the books are constantly changed over. Even with this I was still hoping I'd see the chemistry form and a romance truly bloom between the characters but I just did not feel their connection at all. 

The pacing of this one was super slow for me. There were so many times I considered not finishing it. But I wanted to push in the hopes it would redeem itself. I honestly didn't have the desire to keep picking it up. I kept hoping when I did it would get better but it just didn't. The writing was so much telling rather than showing. The whole book had the characters showing us what they were doing and it took me out of the story completely.

The thing that threw me most was the timeline. The entire book takes place over about a year and a half but it does not flow that way at all. You go from one point jumping to months ahead without any indication it actually happened. It made the story feel very disjointed.

The links to all the classic literature may appeal to classic book lovers.

I went into this thinking it would be a meet cute romcom. That was not the case at all. There are a lot of heavy topics in this one: mental health, death, terminal illness, grief, pregnancy, infidelity, and bullying. There should absolutely be trigger warnings that go along with this one. I honestly would not even label this title a romance given the trajectory of the main characters and what they go through during the course of the book.

Author:

Tessa Bickers studied journalism at Bournemouth university, and went on to co-present a breakfast radio show in the South West.

Moving into celebrity news, she's interviewed some of the biggest names in show business, including Leonardo DiCaprio and the cast of Sex and the City. Tess started her creative career as a singer-songwriter and after a few failed X Factor auditions she went on to perform at Glastonbury Festival, and Secret Garden Party with her band Tess and the Tellers.

These days she's replaced her guitar with a keyboard, and songs for books. THE BOOK SWAP is her debut novel, publishing in 2024.