A bookstore with heart

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This article was published 09/08/2025 (428 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Reviews of several previous novels by Connecticut writer Hannah McKinnon have dubbed the books “perfect beach reads.”

If that means a warm-hearted book that is completely accessible and difficult to put down, then it applies equally to McKinnon’s latest.

The Sandy Page Bookshop is written in the third person, but the chapters are from the points of view of four different characters. The main character is Leah Powell who, at 35, has been an associate editor at Morgan Press in Boston for nine years. At the outset of the novel, she has lost both her job and her fiancé, Greg. To try to regain some of her composure, Leah moves back to Chatham on Cape Cod, taking over the house that her widowed father had rented out once he remarried.

The second chapter introduces Lucy Hart, a 15-year-old whose sister Ella, 18, has been critically injured in a car accident. When Ella, who was a homecoming queen and valedictorian in high school and is now unable to speak, settles into rehab in East Sandwich, her parents want her to have no contact with Jep Parsons, the boyfriend who they believe was driving the car that crashed.

A third main protagonist is 75-year-old Eudora Shipman, who has become a dog rescuer since her husband Milton died. Eudora is a bit of a loner, and her daughter Caroline wants her to see more humans. As if in answer to this, a handsome young carpenter, Luke Nickerson, happens along in his truck. He has done work for Eudora.

Luke is the fourth of the four main characters. All four are believable, three-dimensional, likable people.

Calmed by the ocean, Leah starts thinking seriously about what she’s going to do. She takes note of a big white house that is for rent at the end of Main Street in downtown Chatham, and suddenly thinks she’d like to take it over and turn it into a bookstore.

When Eudora learns of Leah’s intensions, she thinks Luke would be the perfect man to work on the necessary renovations. Luke knew Leah in high school and, after meeting with her, he becomes determined to work on the place. Before anything is done, Leah already has a name for her store: “The Sandy Page.”

A quarter of the way into the novel the shop is completed, and it gradually becomes a favourite of Cape Cod folks, so that a typical day looks like this: “All throughout the lovingly appointed space were people: people reading in armchairs, people gazing up at shelves, people scrutinizing the backs of paperbacks or picking through baskets of vintage wallpaper bookmarks with tiny seashells strung to their tops with silk ribbon (how clever!).”

Meanwhile, Lucy balances her worries about her parents and her sister by landing a job at The Sandy Page. One day, while biking home, she feels drawn to Parsons’s Garage, where Jep’s severely damaged Mustang is awaiting repair or demolition. Since Parsons’s is closed, she takes a look inside the car and finds, among the broken glass shards on the floor of the driver’s side, Ella’s gold chain bracelet.

Could this mean that Jep was not driving when they crashed, and Ella was?

Such questions arise as the novel moves along and as the bookshop develops — Lucy taking on a regular children’s group meeting and Eudora heading up a knitting class. And soon Leah wants to include a café in the shop.

One day she and Luke and Luke’s dog Scout go to the beach, where Leah tells Luke about her recent setbacks. The scene becomes beautifully intimate, even though Scout shakes water all over them, but it ends much too soon, and the reader may wish for more scenes like this one.

As Luke begins to seem like the right guy for Leah, Greg contacts her and says he wants to get back together with her.

The best thing about The Sandy Page Bookshop is the way it is divided up — the way all four main characters are developed as the novel takes shape around them. At the same time, author McKinnon gradually creates a lively bookshop that any ardent reader would love to frequent.

Dave Williamson is the Winnipeg author of six novels, a collection of short stories and the history of Red River College.