I'm never going to pass up the opportunity to read and review a fantasy novel set in bookshops. It always fascinates me how different writers get different things out of that common setting and I rather like the world that Georgia Summers floats here. Bookshops are magic, fed by a river that flows under and into all of them. If a bookshop isn't owned, its magic unravels, which is dangerous for everybody. Ownership has deep meaning and the purchase price is steeper than something as trivial as mere money. These bookshops are characters of their own, boasting their own will. They change, evolve, choose, even hide. And Cassandra Fairfax inherits one.

It's Chiron's bookshop and once upon a time she was his protégé. However, she did something bad that led him to throw her out and she subsequently became a book thief, Cass Holt, who's quite a legend to those in the know. She's shocked to receive news that Chiron is dead, because he was a force of nature who seemed immortal. She's even more shocked to find that he's left her the shop. However, he hedged his bets and also left it to another owner, Lowell Sharpe, who merely read his letter too late. By that point, it was already responding to Cassandra and she formally agrees to take ownership shortly afterwards. Now she has to run it.

The best thing about this book is the glorious worldbuilding that Summers conjures up. It's a wild and fascinating bedrock for a story to unfold over and I would dearly love to visit Chiron's, or any of these bookshops, not least Maud's located in Hebden Bridge. I know that town pretty well; it's where my sister's tattoo parlour was for years before she moved north to the Lake District. I can understand why Cassandra is surprised to find how bike unfriendly it is, full of steep hills and deep valleys, but I can happily tell you right now, Georgia Summers, that I cycled those hills often. Yes, even that one that takes you up to Norland. I had to drop to eighth gear to manage that, but it's quite the rush hurtling down.

However, the worst thing about this book is how much she avoids completing that worldbuilding. I adored what she put into place so much that I wanted more of it, a lot more. I left with a plethora of questions that went completely unanswered. I was dazzled by the river's magic but have little idea how it works, what its rules are, how it can be tapped. What happened to all those bookshops that vanished? Is there really no way to bring them back? What happened to the secret society of owners, each named for a tarot card, when most of them were killed? What power can they wield and what happens if it isn't wielded any more? Presumably Lady Fate will continue on forever but how will her relationship with the world through these bookshops survive if they vanish?

Instead of exploring all this magical bedrock, Summers works through a number of plot strands. It all starts with her taking ownership of Chiron's so the first is how she will manage it, given that a lot of the preparation Chiron gave her long ago was ignored or forgotten. She knows she needs a lot of help but nobody's willing to provide it, until another owner, Septimus, who thinks she's a big mistake and should never be an owner, sends her his niece, Byron. She's a great assistant, but the hidden connection between her and Cass that neither of them know is trivial to figure out. I saw that coming a mile away.

Then there's the clash between Cass and Lowell Sharpe, which firmly falls into a trope I'm starting to recognise early. He's a pain in the ass, but he's also very knowledgable, far more able than her to run a bookshop. One reason that she takes ownership when she does is because he rubs her so much the wrong way that she can't imagine Chiron's under his management. I found the grudging trust and respect between the two to be well handled indeed, both of them growing as characters because of it.

And there's that secret masked society of bookshop owners, which has its own deadly agenda. I'm still not sure what they do and why, but they have power and they are more than willing to use it in pursuit of their goals. I believe that Errata, the cat who adopts Cass and Chiron's but spends an awful lot of time at Sharpe's too, is some sort of spy for this society but we're never given enough detail to know precisely how and why. Again, Summers sets a huge amount in motion here but is unwilling to wrap it all up neatly.

Eventually, given that it's the title of the book, we get to the Bookshop Below. It seems that even though the bookshops themselves are magic, which is why Chiron's is very much a character all of its own, there's an even more magical bookshop underneath them. At least there is when they're healthy, which leads to more questions. Chiron's isn't healthy because of the awkwardness of the ownership transfer, but its bookshop below remains. However, other bookshops that appear to be healthy have lost their bookshops below. Even when Cass takes ownership of Chiron's, the Keeper continues to run its bookshop below, and she presumably has answers to all our questions, but has as little interest in providing them as Summers.

I've probably given the impression that I had all sorts of problems with this book and that's not an entirely unfair statement, but they all boil down to the same problem, which is that Summers put a glorious world into motion and then chose not to tell us as much about it as we want to hear. It's a surprising choice and I can't see a reason behind it. I can't imagine that she doesn't know how it all works herself. She just chose not to explain it to us. Maybe she's keeping that sort of thing for a sequel. This would seem to work as a standalone novel, but it could easily be spun out into a more substantial series. ~~ Hal C F Astell