Abbie Finch loves her job.
Unfortunately, her boss doesn’t love her.
When she finds herself unexpectedly unemployed, Abbie realises that she’s let all her friendships fall by the wayside and has no one to turn to.
Lost and lonely, Abbie decides to leave her comfort zone and join the neighbourhood café’s community table. There she meets aloof, elegant Ethel, down-on-his-luck Bob, colourful, chaotic Dawn and recently relocated Viraj. Friends? Not yet. But when they decide to help the homeless people in their community by staging an extravagant fundraising event, will something that began as a good deed help Abbie find a way back to herself—and make lifelong friends at the same time?
Comment: This book was part of a list of recommendations from a site I subscribe to, which often contains discounts and deals regarding the genres I chose, which is why I decided to try this book, released only last year.
Abbie is a young woman who gets fired for unfair reasons and then, while looking for something else, she realizes she doesn't have close friends nor other things to occupy her, since her job was her only focus. She had even let go of a potential boyfriend, who moved away. Now, with free time on her hands and some worry about her finances creeping out, she starts going to a close coffee shop and after some days of this routine she notices that there is a table with a note saying that anyone looking for a friend can sit there. Abbie is wary, as most clients are, of this table but after seeing two different people sitting there once or twice, Abbie looses her embarrassment and introduces herself. From this moment on, her life does change for she meets four other people who she connects with. They even start a project together, but will their friendship last after it is done?
This is the first book I try by this author (I see Izzy Bromley hasn't yet many books published) so I had no specific expectations other than this would be an uplifting woman's fiction novel.
The cover is bright and colorful so I assumed this would be uplifting and positive, which it was but not as great as I imagined because to me, there didn't seem to exist much evolution or progress from one thing to another when it came to the main character's life. This is a story told by Abbie, a character I liked for her personality and traits but I hoped her "journey" would lead her to some kind of definitive conclusion and, to me, the end was still as vague and unassuming as the beginning was.
The story starts with Abbie being fired and I did sympathize with her emotions as she processes this and the reasons why, after all she didn't have much chance to do anything different to avoid it. Since this is told in her POV, we get to follow her thoughts on what this means to her and to her life, and I did identify with some things - as I imagine many others in similar situations would - for I was unemployed at a time too and the worry and the stress are repeated mantras, it felt. I liked Abbie because she was thinking of the practicalities but also of what it meant to realize she was more alone than she imagined.
Abbie's work consumed all her time, apparently, and not having it anymore confirmed she didn't have many friends. Some of Abbie's musings while dealing with the loss of close contacts made her see how unbalanced her life was and we also get to know how she saw herself though those lens. In this regard, the book was doing what it proposed but I'll have to say this introduction period of Abbie's situation took, perhaps, a bit too long, and the table mentioned in the title, which we find is a social experiment of the cafe, only started being relevant after a while. Perhaps a bit more editing would have helped, because it came to a point it felt some things were, of course repetitive...even if they seem so if one has free time for the reasons Abbie did.
When the interactions with the secondary characters started to happen more frequently, I got to see how Abbie was polite but realistic in her assumptions, as so many of us are when meeting people and judging by appearances. Nevertheless, Abbie and the others started to become friends and go on to start a project to benefit the shelter where one of them is at, for he doesn't have a home of his own. It is obvious the author also intended this book to have a message and a goal, and I can't say it's bad; in fact, shelters for the homeless probably don't have enough help from society, but....
Now I'll feel cold and mean perhaps, but I kind of wanted more of the characters themselves and an evolution for them personally, not as much about what task this person does or what will that one try and so on. I was more interested in seeing how the five friends connected and how their lives could be affected by the project or what was going with them apart from that, and especially how Abbie would cope and would she make more friends or find a new job and things like these. Some of this was more less addressed, but in a very superficial way.
Throughout the novel, we also get to know Abbie regretted some things in regards to Spencer, a man she was very interested in and who went to work faraway. Again, this is not the focus but it's mentioned so often, I figured something would come out of it, and it does, but so, so hastily that I think was more an afterthought. It seemed that, from a certain point on it was all about the friend's project but the other elements didn't get to be solved/dealt with the amount of information those things required. To me, there were things that felt unbalanced for sure.