Fluster

"It took less than it should have done to fluster Florence, but at least she had the good fortune to care deeply about something."

--The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald

That's a little bit a description of me. 

Penny Cooper's in the book too, in a description of the little girl, Christine, who helps the too-easily flustered Florence in her bookshop:

"At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done."

Penny Cooper, perpetually at the age of eight and a half*, will always know exactly how everything should be done.  Or, so she thinks.
In this case, I concur with her:
"It is not correct to change the ending of a book because it's sad."

Penny Cooper did not read The Bookshop--it's short, but it's a grown ups' book.
I did.
It's ... hm, hm, hm... what?
It provides the weird satisfaction (and even enjoyment) of reading about something unpleasant that is beautifully written, like Lolita, a book that figures in this book.

"I don't like this story, but it's sooooo good!"

It's a story of humiliation and defeat:
Florence Green, a widow in her late–middle-age, risks everything to open a bookshop in an English provincial town in 1959. She is undermined by the petty-minded lady of the county abetted by a young man too lazy to care--"What seemed delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble". Even little Christine is not well done by.

How ever did they make a movie of this? I wondered. The book has a wry humor and the pleasure of its sentences; unless it was imaginatively re-visioned (like the film of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by painter Julian Schnabel), a movie of it would retain only its bleakness.

I watched the trailer, and it seems they made it a sort of love story (it's not), with a hopeful ending (very much not). 

[Michael of OCA--You saw it, and advised me against it. Am I right it has a hopeful ending?]

 "Ample charm," a reviewer says.

Ample charm?
The book is like a small and quiet version of Lord of the Flies.

"She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminatees... [Her will-power] was at such a low ebb that it no longer gave her the instructions for survival."

I often use my bookshop as a library--borrowing books and returning them when I'm done. This one's so good, I'm keeping it.

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* I used to say Penny Cooper was eight, but now I realize she is and has always been eight and a half.