The first half of the book contains the same events described from four or five different viewpoints, each one adding some tiny bit of detail that the reader didn't already know. That gets boring quite fast. The latter half of the book doesn't seem to suffer from this nearly as much, and moves along rapidly. The reason I didn't particularly like this book was because it devotes hardly any of its 798 pages to actually describing how the store _itself_ was run. If it weren't for Mrs. Trentham, the store apparently wouldn't have had a single problem in the years between 1920 and 1970. That's hardly realistic or, more to the point, interesting.