the Aer Lingus gift shop at the airport, she impulsively buys a ticket to Dublin instead of Boston. When she arrives, Sarah finds the airport inn booked solid, but the hotel manager offers her a ride to the “nearby” village of Thornwood (almost an hour’s ride), where she finds an unofficial Airbnb cottage available. Sarah’s stay in Ireland will soon be considerably more extended than expected.

At this point, The Story Collector has all the makings of a typical Hallmark movie, especially when Sarah befriends a young girl living nearby with a widowed father. However, Sarah’s tale is only half the story and the less interesting one. While exploring her environs, Sarah finds an old box hidden inside a tree trunk. The box contains the diary of Anna Butler, an 18-year-old girl who lived in the cottage a century earlier. To her surprise, Sarah discovers the diary begins precisely 100 years before the day she found it. Further, as Sarah reads the diary, the present-day events usually dovetail the diary entries one century apart.

Anna’s story is far more interesting than Sarah’s. She’s a bright girl destined to lead a typical existence as a rural housewife. Then, she meets an American traveler, Harold Griffin-Krauss. He’s a student researching fairy tales in Ireland and the various parts of the United Kingdom. And I don’t mean Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. Harold is researching stories of actual fairy sightings and encounters. Anna soon becomes his tour guide and assistant. As Harold does his research, he finds fairies have been prevalent in the Thornwood area for many years. Many Thornwood residents share their stories of fairy encounters with Harold and Anna. These stories are more one- or two-page flash fiction than fully plotted tales. Usually, the fairies are up to no good. Combine all the stories from Anna’s journal, and Harold and Anna formulate a theory about how the fairy underworld beneath Thornwood’s fields works. I can see how the book Harold later publishes would be entertaining (I’d read it if it were real).

Anna’s journal ends before Harold’s work finds its way into print. However, readers of The Story Collector learn the book was published in 1912 by the Oxford University Press, thanks to Sarah’s young friend Hazel, who has a used copy. That’s just one example of the author’s clever use of foreshadowing. Instead of burdening the book with “had I but knowns,” Evie Woods has Sarah discover seemingly trivial bits of information, like the area’s grand estate that had fallen into disrepair. In 1911, it was the home of a wealthy young man who courted Anna. Other examples include several 21st-century characters who are direct descendants of those mentioned in Anna’s diary.

Anna’s diary has everything that Sarah’s story lacks. The author notes some tragedies (including her divorce) that happened in Sarah’s life and how she eventually comes to terms with them. However, it’s a flimsy structure for a novel, even an Irish romance. Sarah uncovers details about Anna’s story that aren’t contained in the teenager’s diary, but her inquiries don’t rise to the level of an entertaining mystery.

By contrast, Anna’s story has it all: a classic love triangle, political intrigue, and even what may have been an actual encounter between Anna and some fairies (at a crucial moment in the story). Even though the present-day scenes give away some details of how Anna’s story ends, the last few pages of Anna’s diary still pack an emotional wallop. If I were making The Story Collector into a movie, I’d have scrapped Sarah’s story almost entirely and concentrated on filming Anna’s diary.

It’s hard to assign a rating to The Story Collector. Unlike books in which an author includes two shorter works to form a novel-length book, these two narratives are entirely intertwined. My only quibble with Anna’s diary is that the writing style is far beyond what a home-schooled 18-year-old in rural Ireland would compose. The colorful descriptions and turns of phrases are the work of a skilled adult author. (Similarly, Sarah’s relatives in America wish each other a “Happy Christmas” instead of a “Merry Christmas.”) But I can easily overlook that flaw because the story is so entertaining. Sarah’s story is rather bland and interrupts the flow of Anna’s tale whenever the older woman takes a break from reading to go about her daily activities. The Story Collector is a collection of one fascinating century-old story and one not-so-fascinating modern-day tale. Put them together, and the book is still solid entertainment.  

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through NetGalley. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.