Why do we read?  Enjoyment.  But the definition of enjoyment?  That’s different for different people.  Those who love thrillers enjoy being kept on the edge of their seats.  Those who love historical novels enjoy being transported to another time.  Those who love non-fiction enjoy learning.  Those who love sci-fi enjoy imagining.

For me, regardless of genre, enjoyment is being caught up and immersed.  I read the way I go out to dinner – to taste something different from what I cook myself.

The Music Shop was absolutely delicious!

The premise is simple:  Frank owns a music shop and has an uncanny knack for helping people find music that they desperately need but don’t know it.  A lonely man, resistant to change, he is surrounded by people but solitary, until a woman in a pea green coat looks into the window of his shop one day and promptly faints dead away on the sidewalk.

I won’t go on about the plot because for me, The Music Shop was about the journey.  From the very start, I found the setting vivid, the characters lovably quirky, the backstories just enough and well-timed.  There was laugh-out-loud humor.  And the music was awesome, all kinds music, not too much to lose me, because the author knew just when to stop.

A disclaimer:  I listened to this book, and the reader was so good that I might have gotten more from it than I would have from reading alone.

But I had a great time.  Like Frank and the music he intuitively knows people need, Rachel Joyce  gave me what I needed last weekend.