Jeannine A. Cook is insistent.

She is not the shopkeeper character in her debut novel It’s Me They Follow, that HarperCollins released this week.

Yes, the shopkeeper owns a Harriett’s Bookshop — named after abolitionist and emancipator Harriet Tubman but spelled with two t’s — on Girard Avenue in Fishtown, just like Cook.

The shopkeeper also grew up in Virginia, like Cook. Yes, @itsmetheyfollow is Cook’s Instagram handle. And yes, the hot pink hardcover features an illustrated image of a woman who looks a lot like her, right down to the dramatic eye makeup, bangs, and colorful headband.

“The shopkeeper is not me,” Cook said as she laughed, one recent Monday afternoon at the real, just renovated Harriett’s Bookshop.

“It’s a novel. A romance. A fairytale. I play around with the idea of what is real and what is not.”

It’s Me They Follow’s protagonist, the mysterious shopkeeper Gee, will feel familiar to Cook’s friends, acquaintances, and social media followers. It’s a story about Gee’s rush to get the fictional Harriett’s up and running in the midst of a pandemic. Like Cook, Gee receives a misspelled sign in the days before the store’s opening. And like Cook, Gee listens to Jill Scott while she’s engrossed in a novel. “The Sound of Philadelphia” is the soundtrack of both of their lives.

But, Gee’s interior life, Cook explains, is a figment of her imagination.

“Honestly,” she said.

In It’s Me They Follow, Gee suffers from an unexplained illness that causes her to faint from the slightest touch. Cook may seem a little standoffish right at first, but she doesn’t pass out from a hug or a handshake.

There are plenty of other made up parts of Gee’s life: she is in love with Me, an enigmatic phantom of a man who saunters into the fictional Harriett’s under an aromatic cloud of frankincense, deer hide, wet soil, and Egyptian musk. She is also part of a writing group filled of eccentric Philadelphians. Gee is an unintentional matchmaker. Cook is none of those things.

“You think you know people,” she said, “You see them on social media. You see them in the news, but you don’t know what is fact and what is fiction. This is my way of talking about heavy things in a playful way.”

There is a serious undertone running through the novel’s 241 pages: the fear of an unknown illness resulting in death. Gee is stressed out, trying to open a business in Fishtown, a neighborhood that hasn’t historically been friendly to Black people and Black owned businesses. And there is a seemingly impossible love story bubbling up: Me is a monk in training who has taken a vow of celibacy. Gee is knocked unconscious from a kiss. (There is also the possibility that Me is all in Gee’s head.)

“It’s quirky and surreal,” Cook said. “But at the end of the day, it’s a story about community, how people help people in nuanced ways.”

It’s Me They Follow puts Cook in the elite class of bookstores owners who are also novelists, in the hallowed company of young adult author Judy Blume, who owns the Key West, Fla. nonprofit bookstore, The Studios; Pen Faulkner winner Ann Patchett who owns Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn.; and Game of Thrones’ George R.R. Martin who owns Beastly Books in Santa Fe, NM.

Marc Lamont Hill, non-fiction writer and scholar, runs Uncle Bobbies Coffee and Books’ is in Germantown.

It’s Me They Follow is a culmination of Cook’s hopes and dreams, a blend of new ideas — like the sustainability of a bookshop in a social media driven society — and old principles — the sanctity of the written word.

It’s a similar vibe felt as soon as one walks into the almost six-year-old real life Harriett’s.

The bookshop’s floating bookshelves feature a mix of popular new hardcovers like MSNBC journalist Trymaine Lee’s A Thousand Ways to Die, Tre Johnson’s Black Genius, and Leila Mottley’s The Girls Who Grew Big. All stacked on top of vintage first-print treasures like James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

The vintage books are gifts from longtime Philadelphians who watched in the shadows as Cook turned bookselling into an art with pop-up shops in Collingswood, N.J., Harlem, and Paris.

Underneath a painting of Afrofuturist author Octavia Butler, and nestled between Ann Petry’s 1955 biography of Tubman, Harriet Tubman, Conductor on the Underground Railroad, are copies of It’s Me They Follow. Placed purposely to be in conversation with the ancestors.

“It’s absurd to be living the full dream of my life in all of its fullness,” Cook said.

Social media makes her success look easy but that’s far from the truth. Rising rents, Cook said, are the death knell for book stores. It’s why she closed Ida’s in Collingswood in February, electing to move the shop — named in honor of 19th century journalist Ida B. Wells — to the Old West Collingswood train station. The new shop will be a traveling retail space and art exhibit.

Rising rents are also what compelled Cook to buy the 258 East Girard building last year so her livelihood doesn’t remain at the mercy of the real estate market. She does, however, have to spend more time than she’d like dealing with the basement that still periodically floods like it did earlier in the summer.

She’s added a cafe to the back of the 500-square foot space where she will sell specialty coffees and teas including jasmine and hibiscus — some of Gee’s favorites. It will open in the coming weeks.

Cook is also debuting Harriett’s sapphire blue interior, with cyanotypes on fabric wallpaper behind the new coffee bar and upholstered on tall-backed reading chairs. The blue cyanotype prints, by local artist Yannick Lowery, feature two young women climbing a ladder to heaven and add to the bookshop’s evolving vintage feel.

It’s not lost on Cook, who had her walls painted earlier this year, that the royal blue hue is the Black woman color of the moment, as they discover its historical meaning. She points to Harvard University professor Imani Perry’s non-fiction book Black and Blues: How the Color Tells the Story of My People and local artist Andrea Walls current exhibit “Indigo Road: Be/holding Southern Landscapes” in Germantown’s Umbutu Fine Art Gallery.

The debut novel. The bookshop. The community. The connection to Harriet Tubman and the ancestors. Cook says it’s all coming full circle for her.

“I don’t know what you call it,” she said. “Maybe it’s magic, maybe it’s healing. I know it’s a tradition. I’m a part of a literary tradition.”