The Book of Love

Three young adults escape from a dark, mysterious place to find themselves in their high school music teacher’s classroom, and to find out that they’ve been dead. To avoid becoming dead again, they have a lot to figure out, including who the mysterious fourth person who came back with them from that mysterious place is, and what’s with the evil wolf that shows up? The bargain they’re offered is that “two will remain and two will return.”

The main characters are mostly young adults, with all the annoying traits that young adults have. The book is long, probably longer than it needs to be, and somewhat repetitive; there are a lot of mysterious and magical things going on that the characters learn about gradually, and most often show more individually, so that some explanations are repeated several times. It’s not always clear why some of the mysterious things had to remain mysterious for so long. (As the characters often complain, “Why couldn’t you have just told us that from the start?”) But the fantastical elements are so strange and the characters so nicely drawn that I can forgive spending more time with them than was strictly necessary. There are actual deaths (not the kind you come back from), and some bad things happen to innocent bystanders, and some endings are a little melancholic if not outright tragic, for all that there’s also quite a bit of humor.

It turns out that despite magical abilities, young people still have to figure out who they want to be, who to love, and how to be in the world.

I listened to the audiobook, and January LaVoy did an excellent job of voicing each character. show less

A weird, fantastical mystery, starting out with small questions and small stakes but growing epic in a way that sneaks up on you as more is revealed. Really beautifully written, with charming, funny characters who don't seem to fit at all with what is occurring around them—and that disjointed union is very striking. This will not be for everyone. But the contrast between the spoken dialogue of really normal, modern, irreverent, notably horny teens, in a lyrical, beautiful, timeless fantasy, really worked for me. I love a dichotomy!

I don't know how to review a Kelly Link book. Things written by Kelly Link will make you scared and sad and glad to be a human. They will make you think and feel and want to stretch farther than you currently are, to be more than you currently are. They are too much and just enough. They remind you why it's good to be a human even while they're reminding you why it's so very hard to be a human.

This one has magic (they all have magic) and music (they don't all have music) and tigers (not a main plot point but worth a mention).

I wasn't sure whether Kelly Link's magic would work in long (or ultra) long form, but I found this wildly successful while being true to the genre that is unique to Link. Rather than read a Link book linearly or narratively, you have to pay attention to the puzzle of how you feel when characters talk about coins or doors or rabbits or wolves or structural racism and follow that feeling to figure out what's actually happening.

Perhaps as a necessary concession (although a move I found kind of disappointing), Link places three info-dump chapters roughly evenly throughout the book to literally catchup anyone for whom creepy vibes are insufficient explanation. Each of these follow an exposition that takes the narrative in an expansive show more dimension, opening up the story from the part that proceeded it. I found the first two thirds of the book wildly successful proceeding in this way, and the back third a little too conventional, while still quite good.

Overall, the book reminded me a lot of the best of Dianna Wynne Jones, where you start to believe that anyone could secretly be anyone else, while also being Loki and while you're unlikely to guess right, you're rewarded for being skeptical about fixed identity.

I also found the book thematically successful as well as tonally so. The major themes of the book: the structures that we take for granted even when they don't work for us, and the magically mundanity of love of all forms were deeply seeded throughout the book without being overpowering. A lot of the negative reviews weren't prepared for the balance between epic plot and quiet meditations on the power of relationships and identity and change, but that's what made the book so worth it for me. show less

Susannah's sister, Laura, is dead and she moves through her days sad and angry, even though she and her sister didn't get along. Then four people show up in a local high school music teacher's classroom. Until recently, they were dead, but are now returned, at least for a time. Two will have to return to being dead. Three of the people Susannah knew well, one has been dead so long he no longer remembers his own name. The three fit back into their own lives, the people around them now believing they were just away for awhile, but they know they have to figure out how to not be the two returned to the shadowy realm they came from. The two beings who have kept guard over each side of the door between the world of the living and the dead show more are here, but neither are what anyone would call trustworthy, and then there is the goddess whose whims and desires are capricious and those she has used to serve her, all with motivations and goals of their own.

This is a book filled with magic and danger, with each person having more or less access to magic and varying degrees of willingness to use magic. As the three figure out what's going on, Susannah is also negotiating her way through an uncertain, magical world, even if the other three won't tell her what's going on.

"Come on," she said. She became a luxuriantly furred four-legged creature with two heads, one a lion's. The other head seemed to be a goat. Daniel saw on the end of her long, scaly tail was a third head, this one a snake.

"What the hell are you supposed to be?" Susannah said.

"I'm a Chimera!" Carousel said, "Doesn't anyone know anything? You could be literally anything and you picked a weasel, Susannah. I just think that says a lot about you."

I think that if I had read this book when I was sixteen or twenty, I would have adored it. The theme of young people facing dangerous forces with the help of magic is an established subgenre of fantasy for a reason, it's very appealing. But I'm no longer twenty and the ability to transform into a bird or even ocean waves isn't what I'm looking for in what I read, but I did enjoy this detour into something I don't normally read, even if the wild plot and fairly simple characters didn't resonate with me. Kelly Link is a talented writer and if and when she writes another short story collection, I'll be among the first to read it. show less

One night three friends, Laura, Daniel and Mo, suddenly wake up in the music room of their high school with their teacher, Mr. Anabin. They soon discover that they've been missing for almost a year, dead, and have been temporarily returned to life. In order to stay alive, they agree to several magical tasks. While they attempt these tasks they can take their lives back up, and no one will remember that they have been missing. But only two will win this contest and stay alive.

But life has moved on for the people that were left behind, and the three friends struggle to settle back in amidst some pretty big changes, all the while trying to complete their tasks and solve the mystery of their deaths. They aren't the only ones interested in show more the outcome though - there's something, and someone, far more powerful that is watching and waiting. And the outcome will affect not just these teenagers and their families, but their entire community.

I'm giving this book 3 stars, which for me equates to "I liked it, it was fine." I think if it hadn't been a staggering 640 pages, I might have rated it higher. At times I felt like the story was dragging, and yet, I'm not entirely sure what could have been cut. I don't usually like magical realism because it starts to feel too nebulous and, at times, pretentious, but that isn't an issue here. The writing is frankly beautiful, and it is very atmospheric. The characters are well written, complex, and highly believable. The main characters are teenagers dealing with some unbelievable events, angsty, messy, sometimes unlikeable, but you find yourself rooting for them because really, who can blame them? At times I felt like this book was too slow, but at the same time, we get to know the characters so well because of how much time we spend with them. They are exceptionally unique and memorable. And this book is truly about the characters and their relationships. (And I just have to say that my favorite character is a tie between Mo's grandmother and Daniel's sister Carousel. I love Carousel. If I ask you what is the first thing you would do if you got magic, and you don't say 'turn myself into a glittery flying unicorn' then why are you lying?)

I'm not entirely in love with the title. Although love is certainly a theme here, and the driving force behind many of the events, it doesn't really seem to capture what this book is.

In the end, this is an atmospheric, beautifully written, slow burn of a book. A group of teenagers struggling to figure out who they really are, which is a story we can all relate to. It is whimsical, fantastical, and vivid, and I think the only thing that really put me off was the slow pacing in combination with the sheer length. If that's something you look for, then I believe you will love this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for the advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. show less

Great. You have to settle in and accept the long, looping construction—but a great read. Reminded me of Buffy, a bit—the television series that went for 7 years with multiple spinoffs, somewhat groundbreaking queer representation, with the teens/young adults stumbling upon forces beyond them, expressing their challenges and identity journeys with witty banter while a “big bad” circles them throughout a season of television, culminating in a final confrontation. But Book of Love does all of these things better than Buffy did. Also reminded me of The Magicians, a bit, where discovering power in no way helps us on our journey to make our lives meaningful—that struggle is the same, whether we are a lion or a gull.