If you love Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, you’re likely to enjoy Gilmore’s Library of Borrowed Hearts. And if you hate it (I do), then you’re still likely to like Gilmore’s nod to Brontë’s tale of doomed, sicko love. In Gilmore’s case,  no one is doomed, the loves are pretty cool, there are two timelines and threading through the novel are BOOKS, certainly Wuthering Heights, but other favorites too, like Montgomery’s Anne books, The Secret Garden, and even the misogynistic infamous Tropic of Cancer (as a matter of fact it’s the book that sets off the narrative). It’s the story of many bookish people, reading books and living messy lives. And it moves, inexorably, unlike Heights, to unresolved HEAs, but overall, things look UP and no one will have to engage in necrophilia. I take that as a win and the publisher’s blurb will suffice for details:

Librarian Chloe Sampson has been struggling: to take care of her three younger siblings, to find herself, to make ends meet. She’s just about at the end of her rope when she stumbles across a rare edition of a book from the 1960s. Deciding it’s a sign of her luck turning, she takes it home with her—only to be shocked when her cranky hermit of a neighbor swoops in and offers to buy it for an exorbitant price. Intrigued, Chloe takes a closer look at the book only to find notes scribbled in the margins between two young lovers back when the book was new…one of whom is almost definitely Jasper Holmes, the curmudgeon next door.

And when she begins following the clues left behind, she discovers this isn’t the only old book in town filled with their romantic marginalia. This kickstarts a literary scavenger hunt that Chloe is determined to see through to the end. What happened to the two tragic lovers who corresponded in the margins of so many different library books? And what does it have to do with the old, sad man next door—who only now has begun to open his home to Chloe and her siblings? In a romantic tale that spans the decades, Chloe discovers that there’s much more to her neighbor than meets the eye. And in allowing herself to accept the unexpected friendship he offers, she learns that some love stories begin in the unlikeliest of places.

Gilmore’s novel is structured in two time periods, 1960 and the present, and alternates between the two. She wisely kept the setting as her fulcrum, never changing, a small town, Colville, in Washington state. As the narrative alternates between its two timelines, it changes narrative perspectives: grounding it initially in Chloe’s POV and then adding the voices of the two 1960s lovers, Jasper and Catherine (modelled after Heathcliff and Catherine without the bad blood or tragic ending, more a beautifully ironic comment on the eye-rolling toxicity of Brontë’s protags. Loved it.), and even Chloe’s adorably precocious siblings.

This makes Gilmore’s narrative sound an unholy mess; my reading experience belied this. I found it engaging and seamless, probably because Gilmore may alternate “voices,” but she keeps her narrative squarely in third person past tense. Gilmore’s characters are also compelling and loveable, which is not to say they don’t have their edgy moments. Gilmore’s character set, and it IS more ensemble piece than singular focus, say harsh and hurtful things, do hurtful things, but other than the one villain of the piece, as Gilmore herself has Chloe comment, they put love above self-interest. They’re difficult and make mistakes, but they’re the people who make the world better, plugging away at loving others and being responsible.

We have a good sense of Chloe’s ethos, for example, as Gilmore introduces us to her. Chloe is resolved, duty-bound, and a little depressed: “Despite the fact that I was little more than a drudge in my small Washington town — or, more likely, because of it — more of my free time was spent deep in the pages of a book. Unless you were super into hunting or fishing, there wasn’t much else to do around here. I worked and I took care of my family. I did things no one else wanted to do. And I read. Always, I read.” So did Jasper. So did Catherine. And that is how they met, wooed, and became lovers. And it’s in that book Chloe finds that she discovers not Miller’s salacious self-indulgent drivel, but a beautiful love between curmudgeon neighbour Jasper and the new girl in town back in 1960, Catherine.

Sixty years later, Chloe’s discovery leads from chapter to chapter and voice to voice to an unfolding that riffs on Brontë’s dark tale. But Gilmore stands with the romance genre. And even though there isn’t the classic romance narrative a romance reader would look for (there’s a romance, but it’s not what you think; there a possibility of a romance but not for whom you’d imagine), Gilmore stands on the side of the HEA angels, romance writers. In the end, Gilmore’s novel is closer in spirit to Wilde’s “Selfish Giant” than Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, more about renewal than stagnation, expressing more humour than despair. I loved every page of it. And you will too. Miss Austen, she too would be a goner if she put her caustic wit away. Gilmore’s novel also reminded me of another recent great one I read, Kate Clayborn’s The Other Side of Disappearing. If you’ve read and enjoyed Clayborn’s wonderful novel, you’ll be a goner for Gilmore’s funnier, softer version.

Lucy Gilmore’s The Library of Borrowed Hearts is published by Sourcebooks Casablanca and was released on April 30th. I received an e-galley, from Sourcebooks Casablanca, via Netgalley, for the purpose of writing this review. This did not impede the honest and AI-free expression of my opinion.