It’s fair to say that the team at Booked Out are bona fide book lovers. You might spy us at lunchtime, walking down Brunswick St with our nose buried in a book, trying to snatch a few chapters of the many novels we have scattered about the office.

Our very own Angela reviews Cath Crowley’s latest novel, Words in Deep Blue – see below!

Readers love bookshops. To an avid bibliophile, shelves don’t simply display pretty spines and impressive cover art. A bookshop is a cave of possibilities; a place where our imaginations are called upon to build worlds and explore the lives of the unknown.

Cath Crowley’s Words in Deep Blue gives us Howling Books, a second-hand bookshop owned by the family of 18 year old, Henry Jones. The store is infamous for the Letter Library, a sort of Wailing Wall of sentimental notes left and scrawled within the pages of its books.

Rachel Sweetie was Henry’s childhood best friend. But a confession unanswered and a move to the seaside took her away until the end of high school. After her brother’s harrowing death Rachel, now older and hardened to life, is back in town.

When the sale of Howling Books starts to loom over Henry and his family, Rachel is employed to catalogue those notes left by ghosts of readers past. In the meantime, Henry is nursing a broken heart and he and Rachel find themselves becoming reacquainted with the old and new parts of each other.

Words in Deep Blue is a beautifully written YA novel by the award-winning author of Graffiti Moon and the Gracie Faltrain series. The soft words and delicate prose make for a touching exploration of grief, loss, family, friendship and love. Cath Crowley has given us a story for booklovers, indeed for lovers of any description. The novel tells us what we already know, that life can and will throw us curveballs. But if we listen to the heart, we’ll always find our way back home.