The Little Bookshop on the Seine is a charming new chick lit novel with a holiday theme. I enjoyed the Paris setting!

Sarah has the opportunity of a lifetime. She trades places with a friend in Paris to run her bookstore. When Sarah arrives she finds the staff comes and goes as they please, customer service is nonexistent, and someone is stealing from the store.

Sarah really comes into her own in this book. In the beginning she is mild and does not stand up for herself. She finds her strength throughout the book, gaining control not only of the bookstore but of her life. My only disappointment was how her relationship with her boyfriend ended up. I wish it had a different outcome.

I am so glad that I realized that this is a Christmas book and read it during December! I loved how this book kept me guessing and wasn’t overly sweet or cheesy! At first I was concerned that the romance would be more than a little descriptive and wasn’t sure how far it would go, but it never went into detail. I loved all the description about Paris and the food and the people! I learned quite a bit about Paris and long to visit even more so now. I also loved how Sarah had such a profound experience from being under the microscope in a small town to being 1 in 1,000’s in Paris. I loved that description! It also reminded me of The Holiday, but instead of trading houses, they traded bookshops!

The Little Bookshop on the Seine by Rebecca Raisin is a sweet read featuring a book shop in Paris, I mean what's not to love. Reading this book for me was a fairly quick read. And in reading this book It felt like I was visiting Paris. I look forward to reading other books in this series.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher through netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review. All opinions expressed are mine alone.

The Little Bookshop on the Seine is exactly the Christmas book I needed to read this Christmas season. It was a refreshing escape from the everyday busy tasks that are inevitable this time of year. The characteres were all so loveable, and the setting of Paris was lovely. A wonderful book that reads like a Hallmark movie, what else could you want?!

Thank you to netgalley and HQN for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Sarah Smith is a bookshop owner in a quiet town in CT. She’s struggling to keep it afloat when her fellow bookshop owner in Paris, Sophie, asks if she wants to swap lives for a few months. Who can turn down a trip to Paris? Running a bookshop by the Seine sounds magical right? What follows is a classic case of expectations vs reality. Parisians aren’t as nice as Sarah expected, her new employees come and go as they please, money is missing from the register, and she misses her boyfriend. Can she turn it around by Christmas?

When I picked it up I didn’t realize it’s a holiday read but it’s perfect! Unpopular opinion but I went to Paris many years ago and had a similar experience as Sarah - I didn’t find the Parisians friendly at all and that was hard for me as a tourist. I did love all the pastry shops tho 😂 I often got aggravated by Sarah because she was so passive and I felt that she could have done more to turn things around faster, but she got there eventually. Overall, this is a cute heartwarming story perfect for the holidays.

I was provided with an eBook of this in exchange for a fair review.

I have read one of Rebecca Raisin's books before and enjoyed it enough to want to read more. The Little Bookshop on the Seine did not disappoint. I really enjoyed this fun - if a little unbelievable (swapping stores in different countries?) - and entertaining read. What I liked about it most what that, which technically a romance book, the romance was a little more backseat to Sarah's actual growth as a character. She had to learn to be herself and discover who she was before she could even begin to settle her relationship with Ridge.

Rebecca is also amazing at writing secondary characters. I loved TJ and Oceana as much as I loved Sarah, and I want them to get stories of their own!

All in all, this was a very enjoyable story and a good Christmas-time read!

The Little Bookshop on the Seine is the perfect Christmas read-- It's "The Holiday" for bookworms! There's a dreamy bookshop in Paris, run by a posh-yet-heartbroken French woman named Sophie. And there's a quiet bookshop in a sleepy town in the US run by Sarah-- who's completely content with her life, her friends, and her journalist boyfriend. But who wants to settle for being content when Paris is calling?

This novel is a realistic love letter to Paris-- heavy on the dreamy side, without failing to add in a few bumps along the way. I guessed incorrectly about how the book would end... and I love the way Rebecca Raisin chose to finish her novel!

Thanks to viewing a Lifetime Christmas movie (Christmas Around the Corner, where the MC rents an apartment & manages the bookshop below for the Christmas holiday), I'd been looking for a story that was somewhat similar. The premise of The Little Bookshop on the Seine sounded like just the ticket.

Sarah Smith is a small town bookshop owner whose shop is struggling & whose freelance journalist boyfriend is more often abroad than at home. When her friend, who owns a bookshop in Paris, offers an exchange of locales for a time, Sarah impulsively says yes.

Sounds good, yes? Oh, would that it were.

I didn't get very far because first and foremost the writing style was not to my taste. There was no hook in the story, nothing to capture my interest. It was quite dull.

It was also hard to figure out how old Sarah, the main character, was. The way she was talking about other people, the way she mentioned her boyfriend being named before a famous one from an 80's soap, made her sound older than I think she was intended to be which made it confusing when in the second chapter she started acting...younger? I wasn't sure what the author meant the reader to think.

The interactions between Sarah and Ridge, the boyfriend, felt really awkward. I thought it was a setup to his being a creep or something, but apparently this (The Little Bookshop on the Seine) is not the first book they've appeared in together? There's nothing in the book (title page, etc.) to suggest that, so I had no idea, so the creep idea is less likely, but who knows? Whether they have a long standing relationship or not, I still found their phone conversation (Ridge is a freelance journalist who is often abroad) awkward and uncomfortable to read. It wasn't one I felt I could stomach reading, assuming Ridge did pop up later on in the book.

Shortly after this conversation, Sarah was contacted by her French friend, Sophie, owner of the Parisian bookshop, and I was done after that.

There's no build up, no gripping story angle. It's right into the exchange and that's so dull. It all happened too fast. The author didn't give the reader a chance to get to know Sarah or Sophie, never mind any of the secondary characters. Why should we care about either of their troubles? It's sad that Sarah might have to close the shop, sure, but in a very abstract sort of way.

A bookish The Holiday sounded like a nice seasonal read, but, unfortunately didn't make the mark.

A light, romantic read about Sarah and her friend Sophie who decide to exchange book shops in order to help Sophie escape her broken heart. Of course, that should allow Sarah to have long romantic walks with her absentee journalist boyfriend, Ridge, but things do not go that smoothly. For those who enjoy romance novels, and books about bumps in the road along the journey to happiness.

A historic bookshop in Paris during the Christmas season? SWOON! ⁣
❄️❄️❄️⁣
Does the setting get any better than that? This charming, light read was perfect for me. I’m a Paris loving book nerd who absolutely loves everything Christmas. I adored the setting details and the vibrancy of Paris during the holiday season. While the characters grated on my nerves a bit and I found some of the storylines unnecessary, this was a cozy read that left me feeling warm and fuzzy. Fans of the movie The Holiday will enjoy this book. For me, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐩 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐞 was 3⭐️. Thank you @harlequinbooks for this advance reader in exchange for my honest review.

What a delightful story for book lovers. At age 29, Sarah owns a bookstore and loves to get lost in romance novels. But she's never left her small town. Through her blog, she's invited to exchange bookstores with a Parisian bookstore owner.
Thinking of the romantic encounters she'd have when her freelance journalist boyfriend visits her in Paris, she's left wanting when he's too busy to visit and the employees at the Paris bookstore are initially less than helpful.
In the story, Sarah makes some wonderful new friends, comes to love Paris, straightens out the employees and learns that she alone is responsible for her fate.
I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review and I was happy to find a new favorite author in Rebecca Raisin.

The Little Bookshop on the Seine was a charming cozy read. Having just been to Paris for the first time last month, while it was Fall, The Little Bookshop on the Seine brought back all the nostalgia. I already knew I was going to love Sarah's passion for books, but her infectious love affair with Paris won me over. The Little Bookshop on the Seine is, unsurprisingly, a book about people who love books. But it's also a book about transformation. Finding out who we are, embracing a new opportunity to re-invent ourselves.

The Little Bookshop on the Seine by Rebecca Raisin is the first book in her new The Little Paris Collection series. Sarah Smith, our heroine, lives in the small town of Ashford and owns her own bookstore (The Little Bookshop on the Corner). Sarah loves her life, especially being surrounded by her favorite thing…books. She has some great friends, and a boyfriend (Ridge), who is constantly away traveling on news stories across the globe. When Sarah’s friend in Paris (Sophie), who also owns a book store, calls her to plead for help, her life will change. Seems Sophie is trying to recover from a failed romance, and is desperate to get away from Paris, and offers Sarah a 6-month exchange; Sophie comes to Ashford to run her bookstore, and Sarah goes to Paris to run the Once Upon a Time bookshop. With an opportunity to get to see Paris, Sarah agrees to the exchange; and feels this will also give her a chance to see Ridge a lot more, as he is usually on assignments in Europe.

When Sarah arrives at the book store in Paris, she is immediately caught by surprise at the size of the shop, which was constantly busy, but the worse part is the staff is unfriendly and disorganized, many of them picking their own hours, leaving Sarah to try do everything, with little or no time for her to enjoy some of Paris. She is also buried with paperwork, and discovers someone on the staff is stealing money. Sarah is also unhappy that Ridge continues to be busy, not visiting her or even calling; making Sarah unsure of where their relationship was going.

What follows is watching Sarah learn to stand up to her staff, eventually earning the respect and friendship with a few of the staff, with them taking turns to take Sarah to see the many sights and delights of Paris. Those were fun and interesting trips that I did enjoy. It was great to see Sarah’s growth over time, as she slowly turned things around in the shop, changing many things along the way, as well as beginning to enjoy her new friendships, and the sights of Paris. I also liked how Sarah was able to discover who was stealing, and find a way to help the culprit, who was in dire need. Nice addition to this story.

The Little Bookshop on the Seine was a charming, delightful and heartwarming story that allowed us to not only learn all about Paris, but also seeing the wonderful friendships in both Ashford and Paris, as well as a nice romance that has a happy ending. I suggest you read The Little Bookshop on the Seine, which was very well written by Rebecca Raisin.

I enjoyed this book. I enjoyed seeing Sarah step out of her comfort zone. However, I never really felt connected to Sarah. I didn't understand her ability to just up and leave nor did I understand her relationship with her boyfriend. I think because of that disconnect I never really got into the book.

Rebecca Raisin writes another charming love story this time set in Paris. When Sarah, who owns a book store is offered a chance to switch places with a friend who also owns a bookstore, she jumps at the chance. Thus starts her life-long hope of seeing Paris and experiencing life as she can only imagine. She also hopes to see more of her boyfriend, a traveling reporter when he passes through Paris with his job. As Christmas approaches many plot lines come together to make a happy, fairy tale ending. This was a very enjoyable read just in time for the holidays.

Readers of this little gem will find a story that is full of magic, reality, and a cute little romance all tied up in a bow! With a few situations for the characters to deal with this story is one that I will totally be checking out again and of course reading the prequel series as well as the next one in this series. It was a light little holiday romance that you could read anytime of year. So curl up with a nice warm or cold drink and read your heart out with this one!!! Book lovers will rejoice in this story!


Go Into This One Knowing: For the book lover!

I really enjoyed a great many things about this book. Characters were fleshed out and the plot was well spaced. Some of the secondary storylines could've used a bit more page space but all in all an enjoyable read!

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.
Quiet and reserved bookshop owner Sarah Smith is given the oppourtunity to swap bookstores with her friend Sophie in Paris, both of them leaving their lives behind and taking over the others’ business and homes. Normally a home body, Sarah jumps at the chance and soon she is living in Sophie’s house in Paris, and running her bookshop. However, she is soon overwhelmed by the lackadaisical, carefree ways of the employees, the hectic days, and the rude customers. That, combined with the fact that her boyfriend is countries away, and Sarah begins to regret her decision. As Christmas approaches, Sarah makes a final plan to get Sophie’s bookstore, and her relationship, back on the right track.
As you can expect, this was a completely cheesy, gushingly romantic Christmas read. Normally, not something I’d ever pick up. However, Ms. Raisin swayed me with her unfailing love of all things literary, and I instantly connected with Sarah <i> (the heroine who says goodnight to her books each night, is a secret “book smeller” and has more friends in bookshelves then in real life) </i>, and of course, the pull of all things Parisiene didn’t hurt either.
Predictable and completely saccharine, this novel plays out like a Hallmark Christmas movie, but since it IS the season, it was worth exploring.
This novel is first in a series, following Sarah and her friends both in the United States and abroad. As I adore all novels about books, bookstores, or libraries, this one had more pull to me than the other ones. Typically a genre I don’t venture into, it was pleasing and uplifting. The ending was predictable and unrealistic, but that is the way of these types of novels and I was not unsatisfied.
For those who are fans of the romance novels, or who adore Hallmark Christmas movies, this novel will find a fan. Also, the deep connection Sarah has with her books and her fellow book lovers will make a connection with every truly passionate reader.

I liked the idea of this book, but I also felt like nothing really happened. She went to Paris frustrated with her boyfriend, become more frustrated with the employees, and in the final 20 pages everything worked out? Okay. Not much plot, an optional buy where contemporary light romance is popular.