The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson

Kitty finds herself dreaming of another world, one where she met the man of her dreams and had the family she always wanted, sort of.  She begins to struggle to determine which world is the reality and which is the dream.  Could she be running from something she doesn’t want to face?  Between the two worlds, Kitty begins to learn new things about herself and discover there are things we wish to escape, but cannot and need to learn how to process and deal with the properly before she is lost within herself.

I was a little skeptical about this book because it is outside of my normal genre of reading material, but it sounded interested and sometimes it is good to step outside of your norm.  I have to say this book was a well written novel.  It was easy to tell when the scenes switched realities as Kitty expressed concern about it when she would awake or go to sleep, those are good transition points for something like this.  There were some twists and surprises such as her son having Autism, though I kind of wish more was done with this than what readers see.  There was a wide range of possibilities that could have happened but didn’t.  The book seemed to focus on one aspect of the disorder rather than other aspects.  It did a good job portraying the mindset regarding how others viewed Autism in the 1950’s which is vastly different from what we know today.

I felt like I wanted more of Katheryn (Kitty in the other world) I wanted to see her trying more rather than being aloof and hands off.  It wasn’t until almost the end when she started to interact more, but I suppose that goes with thinking she was in a dream rather than reality.  I liked that there were not obvious clues as to which was real and which was a dream.  The readers found out at the same time that Katheryn figured it out.  The book had a lot of potential, but seemed to fall short in some areas, drag in some and others completely not make sense.  But regardless of that, I still enjoyed reading it.  Funny how something are easily overlooked for what could be a good story.  I look forward to other books by this author.  I give this a rating of 3 out of 5.  I would recommend it to anyone who likes chick-lit books, but with a disclaimer that it is not the typical chick-lit theme.