"Big-hearted, funny, and gloriously zany, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro is a delayed coming-of-age story about a young woman who dares to change her life, and a celebration of the power of books to unite us all." (from the Goodreads summary)
Juliette leads a very ordinary life in Paris, working at an office job she finds boring, dating some "not-quite-right" men and feeling a little blue about her future. The bright spot in her days are her rides on the Metro to and from work, watching people reading and making up stories to herself about them.
One morning, avoiding going into the office, Juliette gets off at a different stop and finds herself on a street she's never been on. Seeing a book wedging open a rusty gate, she goes in and discovers a shop filled with books, a man named Soliman and his young daughter Zaide. Soliman assumes Juliette is there as a passuer, a person he has hired to take books from his shop and into the world, matching books to readers. Before she can help herself, Juliette agrees to do this, leaving her job and moving into Soliman's story to become a passeur and to take care of Zaide while Soliman is away.
Okay, so what happens then I will leave up to you to discover. Suffice to say, things happen and Juliette's life is changed forever.
While I thought this book was okay, I didn't find it funny or big-hearted and definitely didn't find it to be "gloriously zany." Maybe it is to the readers who first encountered this book in Europe? But I feel like this is a variation on a story I have read before, where there is a mysterious/enchanting/intriguing bookstore, a woman whose life is forever changed by these books . . .
Color me meh on this one.
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