‘The Music Shop’ by Rachel Joyce   (2017) – 306 pages

I miss record shops and book shops.  These stores always seemed like oases in the middle of the commercial desert where you could find something you really liked.

The novel ‘The Music Shop’ takes place in a seedy neighborhood of small shops and bars on Unity Street in London in the year 1988.  The record store owner Frank, “a gentle bear of a man”, stubbornly insists on selling only vinyl even though CDs are the up and coming thing.

“Music is about silence… the silence at the beginning of a piece of music is always different from the silence at the end because if you listen, the world changes. It’s like falling in love. Only no one gets hurt.”

Frank has a knack for picking out music for individual customers just by listening to them talk for a few minutes.  It is Frank’s love of the music that makes him special. One of the bonuses of reading ‘The Music Shop’ is all of its insightful references to various artists and pieces which range from classical composers to punk rock bands.

Frank has a motley crew of misfit friends who live in the neighborhood including his clumsy assistant Kit, the tattoo artist Maud who has a shop next door, the failed priest Father Anthony who runs a religious artifacts shop, and the two undertaker Williams brothers who run a funeral home together and who often hold hands.  These friends of Frank perform in the story like the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion do in the Wizard of Oz as a friendly reassuring backdrop for Frank.

Frank has been emotionally scarred by his eccentric childhood, and he keeps to himself until this woman named Ilse Brauchmann shows up at his shop one day, and the sparks fly.  ‘The Music Shop’ is above all a rom.com.

But I must sound a dissonant note. Rachel Joyce writes crowd pleasers, and in ‘The Music Shop’ she pulls out all the stops.  Don’t expect a great deal of enlightening but confusing depth from ‘The Music Shop’ because that is not Joyce’s thing.  I, like many, many others, was totally bowled over by ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ and Harold’s long walk to save Queenie’s life.  This time out in ‘The Music Shop’, I felt every character and every scene was just a little too calculated and premeditated to induce strong emotions in us readers.  Joyce lays the sentimentality on awfully thick here.  I felt I was being manipulated, and I fought that feeling during the whole time I was reading the novel.  Ultimately I did shed a few tears during the climax of the novel, but I resented crying them.

But you really should read Rachel Joyce because she is really good at this sentimentality thing except for the overload.

Grade:   B+