After finishing Babel, I decided that I wanted to read something a little, well quicker and less involved maybe. I had read and enjoyed the book The Book of Beginnings by Sally Page earlier this year, and got The Keeper of Stories, also by Sally Page, on my kindle, so thought I would give it a go.

The blurb for The Keeper of Stories by Sally Page says:

She can’t recall what started her collection. Maybe it was in a fragment of conversation overheard as she cleaned a sink? Before long (as she dusted a sitting room or defrosted a fridge) she noticed people were telling her their stories. Perhaps they always had done, but now it is different, now the stories are reaching out to her and she gathers them to her…

When Janice starts cleaning for Mrs B – a shrewd and tricksy woman in her nineties – she meets someone who wants to hear her story. But Janice is clear: she is the keeper of stories, she doesn’t have a story to tell. At least, not one she can share.

Mrs B is no fool and knows there is more to Janice than meets the eye. What is she hiding? After all, doesn’t everyone have a story to tell?

The Keeper of Stories is a book about Janice, a cleaner in Cambridge who is rather unhappy in her life. She is unhappy in her marriage, unhappy with some of the decisions she and her husband made regarding her son’s upbringing, or rather that she went along with her husband’s ideas for raising her son. She worries about herself being “just a cleaner”, and where her life is going. But she is a very caring woman who cares about the clients she works with, and they clearly care about her. They also know that Janice is more than “just” a cleaner.

Janice is also a story collector. She hears stories, from her clients, on the bus, and stores them in her head, filing them to remember later on, like you would put books on a bookshelf. Her life changes when she meets Mrs B. A new client who is rather stuck in her ways, who doesn’t want to leave the home she hated with her late husband and who has her own stories to tell, true stories about her life as a spy, yep, Mrs B was, of course, a spy; and a story she makes up for Janice that she tells in installments when Janice cleans for her. The pair strike up something of an unlikely friendship and they affect each other’s lives, each helping the other deal with their own personal circumstances.

It is a heartwarming story, with rather likable characters in. Janice is clearly suffering from self esteem issues, she struggles with how she sees herself, how she thinks others see her, with her relationship ship with her husband and her son, and needs help overcoming those issues.

The book was a page turner and plot driven, and I was definitely keen to keep reading to find out what happened to Janice and also to Mrs B, the second main character in the book. I liked their friendship, I liked that it was hard won, and not always easy.

I sometimes felt a bit irritated with Janice and her self-dismissal I guess. I wished she would just pick up the phone and talk to her son, care less about what people who were relative strangers thought about her. But then I am a woman in my late 40s, and have found that the older I get the less I worry about what other people think of me- certainly people I don’t really know, so that may well be my own bias talking here.

And the story collection thing, well for me it wasn’t as big a part of the book as I was expecting given the title of the book. Janice talks more about her story collecting at the start of the book, and it is a way to show how much she cares about her clients, and to get Mrs B talking. But I didn’t feel like it was the key to the whole book or anything.

I will be honest and say that while I enjoyed the book, I Don’t think it will stay with me the way that, say, Babel will do. It was a great read for the summer holidays when I am home a lot with the children and they are keeping me very busy. I would recommend it for a good holiday read as well, and it’s a good story, a nice read which does keep you turning the page to find out what happens, but it’s not too demanding.

I read this book on my kindle, as it was my bedtime reading book, and I prefer to read at bedtime on my kindle, but it is also available in paperback,

I would give this book between 3.5 and 4 stars out of 5.