The House of Marvellous Books
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Tucked away in a near-derelict library in the center of London, The House of Marvellous Books is a publishing house on the brink of financial disaster. With assistant Ursula asleep at her desk, head publisher Gerard going health and safety mad, and chief editor Drusilla focused on finding a supposedly priceless but famously missing manuscript, there is hardly anyone left to steer the ship. Young Mortimer Blackley, assistant editor, charts the descent of the House in his logbook as it lurches from one failure to the next. Will mysterious Russian buyers, lurking in the wings, stop the ship from sinking at great cost to all? Or will Drusilla find the legendary Daybreak Manuscript and save the day? With witty and sharp observations, Fiona Vigo Marshall draws upon a career spent working in small publishing houses to create a laugh-out-loud ode to the publishing industry.
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I received a free digital ARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review
There's a potential for coziness in this book, and something almost comforting about the repetition in Mortimer's diary entries. However, I was very close to not finishing this book. If I hadn't been reading it for Netgalley, I would have set it aside a few chapters in.
The narration style is verbose, the main character - Mortimer - is bland, pretentious, and unlikeable, and the supporting characters equally so. All of this would be easy to overlook or accept if there were a plot, yet nothing of note happens. I'm all for books where there's no real plot, where the atmosphere of the book is the whole experience, but this wasn't one of those.
That being said, it's likely that I was just not the target audience for this book.
