The Music Shop

St Just Monday Morning Reading Group 28th November 2022.

The Music Shop. Rachel Joyce.

Most of the group enjoyed this book. “Quite charming”, and “like a good film script” were some of the comments; a very good book of its type, easy to read, and interesting. Readers liked the short chapters, and found it unpretentious and heart-warming. The characters were well depicted, particularly Maud and Kit and their new careers after the record shop closed.

Adverse criticisms were that it perhaps took a while to get into, and that the descriptions of Frank’s relationship with Peg (though interesting) interrupted the narrative. Some people found Frank and Ilse’s relationship “unlikely”, and thought that the happy ending (after 21 years) felt a little unrealistic as well. One reader wondered why Ilse didn’t take up a secondary instrument when prevented from playing the violin, suggesting perhaps the voice.

The book did engender quite a lot of discussion. Some readers did, and some did not, find it convincing that Frank knew intuitively which music his customers needed to listen to when they came into the shop. Was Frank, or was he not, using mystical powers to do this? One person wished for more analysis of these choices of tracks, especially the cross-genre recommendations, and was dubious about the viability of the Hallelujah Chorus flashmob at the end (although the idea of doing it was highly attractive). We spent some time talking about the location of Frank’s vinyl record shop, and the outcome was that we thought it must be an amalgam of various northern cities. The phases of development, the closing shops and the threats and graffiti, the redevelopers and the general sadness of a run-down city area, were familiar to everyone. We also noticed that Frank’s shop (at least at the end of the book) was acting as a sort of community hub, which was relevant to present conditions and, in fact, to the library in which we were meeting. We examined some of the “reading group questions” from the back of the book, but on the whole found that we didn’t like this method of debate and would rather discuss our own impressions of the book.