Here There Be Books (BL)

This review was originally posted at Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog on Jan. 13, 2012.I hadn't realized that The Green Man is a sequel to another book when I requested it at NetGalley, but in retrospect I don't think it matters all that much. Apparently it's got some of the same characters from the first book in it, but the POV is mostly from a new character, so I don't feel too annoyed that I read this one first before reading the previous book. O's aunt Emily is weird and probably crazy, but in the best sort of way. She's a poet who owns a bookstore, and though O has reservations about spending the summer with Emily at The Green Man she wants to help her out after Emily's recent heart attack. What O finds at the bookshop and about aunt Emily's past, leads to a more exciting, magical, and poetry-filled summer than O ever expected.What I liked best about The Green Man is that it's mainly about the importance of poetry, of poets, and how poets use poetry to navigate the world around them. There's a secondary plotline which is where the magical realism shows up, and to be honest that part of it felt less well-integrated into the story than everything else did. It builds up into a big-- and important-- thing by the end of the book, but the end is SO different from the beginning that they read like they belong to two different books.I loved the first plotline. I like poetry, and I like bookstores, and I like weird people who spend their whole lives ensconced in poetry and books. The second plotline was neat, but I was less enamored of it than I was of the other. I suppose that would be where reading the first book would have come in handy: I'd have been more invested in the fantasy part of the plot more and I'd probably have liked the book more overall, too.Still, despite the problems I had with the merging of the plotlines, The Green Man is an enjoyable book with a lot of stuff I adore in books. It's got poetry! And romance! And summers spent in bookstores! Small town stuff where the small town is a good thing rather than a bad thing! Magical realism thingies! And a protagonist who's smart and likable and just a little bit of a worrywart.