Book review: The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson

The thirty-ninth book I read in 2015 was The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson. Set in Denver in the early 1960s, it tells the story of a woman living two lives: in one, a successful single career woman running a bookstore with her best friend, in the other, a happily-married mother of small children.  When she falls asleep in one life, she wakes up in the other.

For a while, she merely enjoys what she considers to be a vivid recurring dream, exploring the road not taken, but eventually she must decide which of the two worlds she is experiencing is the real one -- and which she wants to be.

Apart from the implied supernatural element, I was also drawn to this book because my mother was a single woman in Colorado for a while in the 1960s, albeit in Boulder rather than Denver.  I very much enjoyed it.  Each of the realities the protagonist (Kitty in one life, Katharyn in the other) experiences is rich and believable, and I went back and forth in my own mind over the course of the narrative over which one was "real."  Even more impressive, the final resolution felt earned, rather than a cheap or trite cop-out ending.  This was Cynthia Swanson's first novel, and I'll certainly be interesting in taking a look at her second.