The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams, by Mindy Thompson

Yay me! I have a Timeslip Tuesday post! I also have a house that is slowly becoming habitable after a home renovation project, which involved moving the washer/dryer from a small back room to the pantry, freeing up the whole ex-laundry room for books. The floor of this room has now been varnished, the walls (mostly) painted, and bookshelves are back in place. The books in this room are all stock for my retirement plan (a new and used children's bookstore), though there are shelves of stock in many other rooms and in all the closets too, and on the top shelves in the kitchen that are too high for me to reach. So basically I am living in a used bookstore, a bookstore of dust (thanks to the floor sanding) and dreams, just like the title of today's book--The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams, by Mindy Thompson (middle grade, Oct 21, 2021, Viking Books)

Poppy also lives in a bookstore, named Rhyme and Reason. It is the heart of her world. It is also magical--its doors open to any place and time where there is someone who needs the respite a bookstore can offer. The year of the story is 1944, the place is Sutton, New York, and young men are starting to return from war. Poppy's big brother, Al, didn't go to war because of his asthma, but his best friend Carl did. When Carl is killed, Al is crushed not just by grief but by a huge sense of wrongness....and becomes determiend to use the bookstore's time travelling magic to save his friend, even though this is utterly forbidden by the Council that governs the world's magical bookstores.

When Al starts pushing the magic towards his goal, it has dark and dire consequences. The bookstore magic is a beacon of light against a terrible darkness, but now the darkness starts to find a way in. Things go wrong in the shop, and Poppy's father becomes very ill. Al isn't interested in the store anymore, and Poppy is basically the only person keeping it going. As Al becomes almost entirely a creature of darkness, Poppy struggles to pull him back from the abyss before it is too late...not just for her brother, but for the magical bookstores.

And she does set things right, with the help of two friends she makes in the magical bookstore world during this crisis, and with a time travelling trip of her own to a battlefield in Europe, the one in which Carl is killed. But it is a bittersweet ending....

The bookstore is of course a wonderful setting for a story, and the stress and anxiety Poppy goes through makes the story gripping (especially for those of us who like stories of kids desperately trying to keep the family business going, a niche subgenre I am fond of)! Lonely kids will relate, kids with older siblings going down dark roads will have the heartstrings pulled hard, as will kids who are forced to take on the work of grownups before they are ready for it. That being said, the playful magic of the bookstore never quite becomes overshadowed by the threat of the Darkness, although it came close (I found the threat of the darkness the least interesting part of the book, actually; existential magical threats aren't as interesting to me as small details of daily life).  

(I'm a bit surprised by the bit I remember most clearly--two characters from different time periods both like to sit in the same chair, and get into fierce arguments about it. Finally, Poppy gets fed up with their bickering, and instead of just getting annoyed as she usually does, she asks each of them why that particular chair, and when she knows their reasons, she's able to solve the conflict for good. A useful little life lesson that I appreciated!)

short answer--give this to any 9-11 year old  who loves bookstores and/or time travel!