A week ago, I reviewed the first Once Upon a Time Bookshop story by Alice Hoffman, “The Bookstore Sisters”. It told of Isabel Gibson who fled Brinkley’s Island, Maine, for New York City. She left behind her sister, Sophie, and the bookstore the sisters had promised their father they would always run. But, it was too much for Isabel, whose mother died of cancer when she was ten.

Now, in “The Bookstore Wedding”, Isabel has been back on the island for five years, working with her sister, and learning to love her childhood best friend, Johnny Lenox. When Isabel’s mother died, she decided she was never going to love because it was too dangerous, and you could lose the person you loved.

Perhaps that’s why every time Isabel and Johnny planned their wedding, there was a disaster. Johnny’s father had a heart attack when they were getting ready for their wedding the first time. A hurricane struck during what should have been their wedding. And, when they were going to marry in the winter, the bookstore’s pipes burst.

People on the island are taking bets on whether or not Isabel and Johnny will ever marry when tragedy strikes, and Isabel postpones it again, this time for a year.

These are short stories, but Alice Hoffman manages to evoke the setting and the magic of the bookstore and the attached bakery. She also writes those wonderful Hoffman phrases that sound ordinary when written, but are beautiful in context. “There was never a bad time to fall in love.”

If you’ve never read Alice Hoffman’s writing, you might want to start with these stories.

NOTE: “The Bookstore Sisters” is currently free through Kindle Unlimited on Amazon, and only there because it is an Amazon Original Story. The second in the series, “The Bookstore Wedding”, was just released, and is also free. The stories do stand alone, but the third story, “The Bookstore Keepers”, will be released February 4.