The Little Shop of Found Things

Paula Brackston has built a career on contemporary fiction with magical or historical edges, and The Little Shop of Found Things opens her Found Things series. Xanthe and her mother buy an antique shop in a small English town. Xanthe has a particular gift, the ability to hear the voices of objects with strong histories, and the silver chatelaine she handles in the first chapter pulls her into the seventeenth century.

Brackston’s time travel mechanics are loose. The book isn’t trying to be science fiction. The historical sections are romantic and occasionally suspenseful.

The contemporary plot, with the shop, the small town characters, and Xanthe’s relationship with her mother, gets equal time and is sometimes the more interesting of the two.

For readers who liked Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic or Sarah Addison Allen’s books, this is in similar territory. Cozy without being saccharine. The series continues if the first one lands.