The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams

Mindy Thompson's The Bookshop of Dust and Dreams is a magical story for 9 year olds about a girl whose family bookshop has feelings of its own.

What happens

Poppy Fulbright lives above Rhyme and Reason in Sutton, New York, in November 1944. It isn't an ordinary bookshop. It reaches a hundred years into the past and the future and brings in the customers who need it most. So a regular from 1989 might be browsing next to a suffragist from 1913.

The shop is also very sensitive. When a customer is rude about its filing system, the wallpaper turns grey and the lights go out. Poppy can calm it with a hand on the wall, and the wallpaper turns back to cream. It even made her a flock of fireflies out of old book pages when she was learning to walk (who wouldn't want that as their family story?).

At school Poppy is the odd one out. She's the only girl in her class not invited to a party, and the others laugh at her poem about dragons and evil queens. Rhyme and Reason is her best friend. She can't imagine loving anywhere more.

The shop has rules, and the biggest one is that the family must never use its magic for themselves. That rule starts to matter when the war comes into the shop. Her big brother Al's best friend, Carl, is a soldier. In the first chapter a telegram arrives to say he's been killed. Al's grief turns to anger, and then to a very dangerous idea.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a story about loss. Carl's death is early and it isn't described, but the family's grief is at the centre of the chapters that follow. Al smashes a memorial the shop has made and punches a wall. There's also backstory about two refugee children whose parents were killed. Poppy is thirteen and her worries are those of an older child.

If your reader is ready for something sad, though, there's a lot of warmth here. The regulars are funny and kind, and Poppy's love for the shop is catching. It's a book about stories helping people through hard times.

What to read next

For another girl who'd rather be in her family's bookshop than anywhere else, try Tilly and the Bookwanderers. Tilly lives above her grandparents' shop in London, and her own friendship troubles at school will feel very familiar.