Happy Wednesday bookish people! I am so excited to be part of the book tour for The Mystery of Henri Pick by David Foenkinos. Thank you to Poppy Luckett for including me in this boom tour.
In this book review I will give star ratings to four categories and I will write a little bit about each one. I will try to keep it as spoiler free as possible. I hope you enjoy my book review.
The Mystery of Henri Pick Plot:
I went into this book thinking a mystery, that’s great, and there is a mystery within this book but it doesn’t seem to take up a lot of the plot. Actually, it didn’t feel to me like this book had very much of a plot. There is a couple who find a book in a shop in Crozon, Brittany and part of this shop is all manuscripts written by people and they were never published but in this shop you can go and read some of them if you like. I found this to be such a lovely idea and it seemed to give the book a slightly magical feel, even though there is no magic in the book. The books are filled with hope and then despair.
One of the main themes throughout the book is love, and more specifically lost love and whether you really know the people you love. All these different twisting tales of lost love and books that were loved before the authors were rejected fills this story and it becomes a short tale of something more. I wanted something more from the book, probably plot-wise although with this story it is hard to tell, because I found myself not very engrossed in reading it.
The Mystery of Henri Pick Characters:
There are a lot of characters within this book so I am only going to talk about two of them. Firstly, Delphine Despero who is part of the couple who find the book supposedly written by Henri Pick. She is part of a publishing company and what I liked about her was the spirit of the character. She falls in love with the words on the page in a similar way to how I do and when she likes a book it was obvious. I liked how determined she is.
The second character I will talk about is her boyfriend, Frederick Koskas. I did not like this character at all. I am not sure if the author intended you to dislike him or not but there is nothing about him I like. Without spoiling too much, his character just gets worse, he gets more selfish and more caught up in himself and jealous of other authors even ones who are deceased. His character made this book a struggle to read.
The Mystery of Henri Pick Writing and Dialogue:
There’s not much for me to say here. I liked that the chapters were short because I felt like I was getting through the book really quickly and the writing style made me think of The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.
The Mystery of Henri Pick Overall:
I gave this book three stars overall because it needed something more for me to enjoy it and even though I liked the overall premise I didn’t get along so well with a few of the characters.
Blurb/Synopsis:
In the small town of Crozon in Brittany, a library houses manuscripts that were rejected for publication: the faded dreams of aspiring writers. Visiting while on holiday, young editor Delphine Despero is thrilled to discover a novel so powerful that she feels compelled to bring it back to Paris to publish it. The book is a sensation, prompting fevered interest in the identity of its author – apparently one Henri Pick, a now-deceased pizza chef from Crozon. Sceptics cry that the whole thing is a hoax: how could this man have written such a masterpiece? An obstinate journalist, Jean-Michel Rouche, heads to Brittany to investigate.
By turns farcical and moving, The Mystery of Henri Pick is a fast-paced comic mystery enriched by a deep love of books – and of the authors who write them.
That’s it for this book review, I hope you all enjoyed it!
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