Battle of the Bookstores

Josie Klein manages a bookstore called Tabula Inscripta in Boston, where she carefully curates and takes great pride in her selection of literary fiction and nonfiction. She loves unpacking and shelving new shipments, selling her favorites to customers, and reading advance reader copies before they release. In fact, Josie has an anonymous account on a website called BookFriends where users can write reviews or discuss literature in forums with other booksellers. When a book releases with a quote from a recent review she left after reading the advance copy, Josie excitedly shares the news with her online friend, RJ Reads, who congratulates her. She tells him that her quote is alongside a quote from Penelope Adler-Wolf, the owner of Wolf Books in Providence, Rhode Island. Josie greatly admires Penelope and her bookstore, hoping to be like her someday.

Josie attends a lunch meeting at Beans, the coffeeshop next door, with Xander Liang, who owns all the businesses on this block—including her bookstore, Beans, and Happy Endings (the romance bookstore on the other side of Beans). There, she meets Brian, the owner of Happy Endings. There is immediate animosity between Josie and Brian when Xander quotes Brian’s previous description of her bookstore as “a bleak wasteland of existential dread” (8), and Josie accidentally belittles Brian’s bookstore by saying that he “just” sells romance fiction.