Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) is a widow who dreams of opening a modest bookshop in a tiny Sussex seaside town, which by 1959 is virtually cut off from the outside English literature world. Florence is kindhearted to a fault, and because she lacks that needed killer business savvy, and instead possesses great naivety by first hiring a ten (10) year old girl named Christine (Honor Kneafsey) who is physically removed from her school classroom for being under aged and gainfully employed. Florence next hires a smarmy unemployed Milo North (James Lance) who has a hidden agenda for his willingness to take the job at the pay grade that his ten year old predecessor was making, which should have set off warning bells for the naive yet generous bookshop owner Florence.
This is the story between pure goodness (Emily Mortimer) and her dream of opening a bookshop for the townspeople more than for herself and lack of want for a successful business, and the sheer vindictiveness when a rich woman Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson) wants to remove the recently opened bookshop and replace it with a ridiculous arts center.
Florence does have a small cloister of bookshop supporters, none greater than a recluse widower named Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy) but Florence is out matched by the social status and wealth of the vindictive Violet Gamart who takes any and all means of usurping both old and newly creative bylaws to oust Florence and her bookshop for her own vanity project, the arts center.
Mrs. Shullivan and I were both brokenhearted and ecstatic with how the film ends, so no spoilers will be forthcoming. See the bookshop for yourself and you become the critic. As for myself, I give the bookshop a 7 out of 10 rating for its warmth of story line and worthy ending for a good versus evil film.
