September 24, 2025
Provided images/HarperOne Group
Before 'It's Me They Follow,' Jeannine Cook wrote a short story collection and a children's book. Her memoir is due in March.
Readers who pick up Jeannine Cook's debut novel "It's Me They Follow" might notice some similarities between the author and her main character.
Like Cook, who opened Harriett's Bookshop in Fishtown weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic, the protagonist is a bookseller preparing to launch a new store in the Northeast Philly neighborhood in early 2020. The character is known only as the Shopkeeper, though she's a bit locally famous for her short story collection "Conversations with Harriett," an imagined series of discussions with Harriet Tubman. Cook penned a book of the same name with the same concept in 2020.
Even the title "It's Me They Follow," a phrase attributed to the Shopkeeper, is lifted from Cook's earlier work. She wrote a poem that ends with the line nearly two decades ago, and remixed it into both her children's book "Harrietts" and "Harriett’s Coloring Jawn," a coloring book she created with Philadelphia International Airport. Now, it frames her first novel, which debuted Tuesday.
"It's a playful novel," Cook said. "And one of the things that it plays with is fact and fiction, and just the power of a story and storytelling and the stories we tell ourselves. I think that there's some fun to that. I think it's really fun for people who have been on the journey with me, who've been a part of the Harriett's story unfolding. But I think people who haven't been will also have a good time with the novel."
There's a surrealistic quality to "It's Me They Follow," and not just because of the blurring of reality. The Shopkeeper's love interest dips in and out of her life, leaving behind letters for her to decode and seemingly appearing, then vanishing, from view. She spies a school of dolphins after emerging from an endless highway tunnel, and a baby bunny winks at her once she's parked and exiting the car.
The protagonist is also constantly dodging That Energy, a nebulous force of disruption she senses when vandals ransack her shop or she simply encounters a gruff delivery driver.
"We all are dealing with some sort of oppositional force, and the question is what are you gonna do about it?" Cook said. "How are you gonna engage or not engage with that energy? And so I liked calling it that because I felt like it was something that we could all identify with and continue to name moving forward."
This heightened storytelling is a fitting choice for Cook, whose biography reads like a hero's epic. She kept her fledgling shop alive during the pandemic by selling books on the sidewalk and even delivering orders via horseback. By 2021, she opened a sister store, Ida's, in Collingswood. Her operation expanded most recently to Paris with the pop-up shop Josephine's. All three bookstores are named after fearless Black women: Tubman, Ida B. Wells and Josephine Baker.
Following a GoFundMe campaign, Cook now owns the building that houses Harriett's. She has continued to tinker with the gallery-like space, where books are displayed like works of art and it's not uncommon to hear a harpist or violinist. A cafe will soft launch within the shop soon; the staff has been training with Càphê Roasters to hone their barista skills. Cook's memoir, "Shut Up and Read," is also due in March 2026 and she has a spot in the Karura Forest of Nairobi marked for her next bookstore: Wangari's. It is named for Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Cook swears she takes breaks. She also never does anything alone — a mantra she adopted from one of her literary heroes Sonia Sanchez, who's name-checked in her novel. But after drawing inspiration from Tubman, Wells, Baker, Maathai, Sanchez and so many others, she feels a responsibility to do as much as she can with the time she has.
"In many ways, I think it's just my turn to do my part, on what we call maybe the spectrum of freedom," Cook said. "It's just right now, in this moment, I have the baton. And so I'm gonna carry it as far as I can carry it, and then pass it on to the next generation."
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