NOT QUITE BY THE BOOK

A 31-year-old woman who runs a bookstore founded by her parents leaves her life behind in a six-week effort to find happiness.

During a phone call with her mother, Emma Rini realizes that she hasn’t taken a day off work in seven years. She also realizes that she hasn’t been happy for a long time. She’s lived rent-free in the apartment above the bookstore her parents own ever since she graduated from college, but she works 12-hour days at the store and has reached the brink of exhaustion. She’s been saving for her fairy-tale wedding and dreaming of "the man who’d sweep [her] off [her] feet" since she was 10, but he hasn't appeared. On the spur of the moment, she decides to rent a historic home from a fellow bookstore owner for six weeks in Amherst, the town she commuted to for college but never lived in. She’s determined to live like Amherst's reclusive Emily Dickinson—gardening, baking, writing poetry and letters, finding happiness in a life alone rather than looking for love around every corner. (Dickinson’s possible queerness is not referenced, which is surprising given Emma's often tedious fixation on the poet's life and her statements on love, which Emma frequently equates with her own intense desire to find romance with a man.) Emma quickly discovers that she hates being alone and she can’t really bake very well. On top of that, rabbits quickly demolish the garden she planted. She makes friends with the bookstore’s owner, Grace, who’s nearing 70; Grace’s handsome nephew, Davis, 34; and a host of other people she meets at a thrice-weekly letter-writing class. Despite her determination to learn to live without love, so much ink and so many tears are spilled on her obsession to do just that, it becomes tiresome.

Despite the melodramatic opening, this is a cozy, undemanding tale of a woman looking for her happily-ever-after.