"Magic, like grief, could come welling up. The difference was how grief slammed into you without any kind of ceremony or invitation. Magic you could use. Grief just used you up."

-The Book of Mo

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for the ARC.

To say that The Book of Love is nothing short of spectacular would be doing the novel a great disservice. This book was entertaining, captivating, beautiful in its entirety, and a definite re-read for my bookshelf. Combined with a near-lyrical prose and fable-like incredulity, Kelly Link creates a world that is entirely too familiar and yet vastly impossible, along with characters that are whole and complete in their own right.

The Book of Love, through a myriad of point-of-view perspectives, follows a small group of New Englanders a year after they died. Laura, Daniel, and Mo mysteriously disappeared one night and have been presumed dead. Pulled back to life by their high school music teacher, Mr. Anabin, they are given a chance to reclaim their previous lives as if nothing happened, as long as they can discover how they died that fateful night.

All of these characters, ranging from upright and sensible Laura, to her wild and grief-stricken sister Susannah; dutiful and loyal Daniel; sarcastic and wiser than his years Mo; and even mysterious and fluid Bowie, have complex and in-depth stories that are laid out in the tiniest puzzle pieces. It is a feat for authors to not only create such vastly different personalities, but to show us their wants and vulnerabilities in such tender increments.

What also captivated me was the system of magic Kelly Link creates. At times frightful and dark, and other times whimsical in a Hayao Miyazaki-esque grandeur, this book invites you to get swept away, to throw out all sense of reality, and to go with the flow. There are references to pop culture that don't feel entirely dated or forced, and combined with a tilted writing style, there is so much to devour and enjoy on every page.

I loved this Book of Love, and I don't think anyone will be able to let me be silent about it.

Kelly Link has previously been hailed as a writer of short stories, many of which I have read. Now she tries her hand at a novel. It’s a long one, but on the whole quite charming; certainly never tedious. If I told you it’s one of those magic realism novels you might--supposing you’re not a fan of the South American, faux naive prose translated from Portuguese or Spanish--say, “thanks but I’ll pass.”

It’s not. It’s quintessentially American--a small New England town with its coffee shops, karaoke bars, and a famous writer of Romance fiction in residence. And the premise is interesting, too. Three teenagers (Daniel, Laura, and Mo) and someone else find themselves back in the classroom of their music teacher, Mr. Anabin, just before Christmas. They know they’ve been returned from the dead, but they soon find that their friends and families (chiefly among them Laura’s slightly older sister Susannah) think they have been in Ireland, studying music on a scholarship. The events that follow ensue from this premise.

Yes, teenagers have returned, but be not afraid: this is not a YA, but adults who like YAs will certainly enjoy it, but with a caveat. The Book is long, maybe too long. Sometimes Link seems to be saying, “Look! I’m writing!” And then, too, the book is overpopulated with a supply of children who, with one exception, don’t seem to add much to the tale.

The construction is weird. There are no chapter names, no numbers. It’s just “The Book of Susannah,” or whoever. So each chapter continues the story of the multiplicity of characters herein. And that leads to another issue: I always say this about multi-pov novels: there’s always one character you’d rather not hear from. But (surprise) not here. The author has, for me anyhow, rendered them all quite interesting.

And maybe the best thing about the novel is the way Link brings a distinctive sense of humor to the book, so you may find yourself laughing unexpectedly at characters emerging full blown from an egg or escaping from a goddess with murder on her mind by turning themselves into a . . . you’ll see. And a unicorn appears. Of course it does.

Notes and Asides: Kindle readers who like to set their devices to time left in chapters will happily discover that each “The Book of” functions as a chapter.

This book is pure fantasy. Sci-fi. Is it about love? Not to me, it's not. I

liked it, some parts were fast moving other parts a bit tedious. I must admit once I was nearing page 550 I couldn't wait till the end. I felt it was much too long. Had I known this all before I read it I wouldn't have read it. It had such fabulous reviews, that confuses me. I think the name of the of the book is wrong as to me the book had very little to do with love. It just wasn't at all what I expected and not in a positive way.

Kelly Link writes so beautifully about love in all its many dimensions. I hadn't realized that this novel was for young adults, and it really is too good to be for any one age group, so it doesn't matter. The characters are all very different, funny and intelligent, talented and wise beyond their years, and I am in love with them all. Link's attention to the many ways love winds through their relationships is astounding, fun, yet full of pain. It really is a book of love.

A common criticism is that the book is too long. I'd say it is too character driven and too much into explaining the magical structure and not enough action. I'm not too sure about the book title because it seemed more about exploring sex than love. I enjoyed it, but I think it needed clearer structure...the story just seemed to go on and on. Often the first third of a story introduces the characters and the problem. In the middle third people wander around the country, or prepare for battle, or make unsuccessful attempts to resolve the problem. And finally we got the big battle or the race against the deadline, or a surprise betrayal or new facts that threaten to screw everything up...and then the resolution. It just felt a little too nice. it reminded me of how I felt about P. C. Hodgell after Godstalk or Patricia McKillip after The Riddle Master of Hed trilogy. Hodgell lost the edginess of evil and horror, and McKillip's characters didn't have the inner almost anguish of the first hero and heroine.

How do I feel about this one? It took a lot of energy to get the hang of it for me, but then like a freight train it was unstoppable.

Characters I could relate with and love. Situations that made me feel in my bones what it was like to be a young adult again. Without the condescension or the nonsense that you usually have to deal with.

Three friends die, four come back. Chaos and death ensues before the ending brings it all together in a way that Maryanne Gorch would be proud of.

I purchased this book based on the rave reviews. However, I found it full of completely unnecessary detail and events that really don't move the story forward...or not enough to justify the text. It reminded me of one of those stupid Instagram videos where they keep saying something is going to happen but it either never does or it is excruciatingly slow to get to the point. You could cut this book in half and not lose anything of importance.

I really wanted to like this book. I tried. I didn't like most of the characters. I thought the flow was weird - the multiple narrators made the timeline double back. It was sometimes predictable - I suspected most of the doppelgangers of something fishy before I knew what they were. Although the sex scenes weren't explicit, they have more information than I wanted to know.

I thought the premise was unique. The connection between music and magic was interesting. I found the book to be LGBTQA inclusive.

El libro recibido es una impresión bajo demanda (PoD), algo que no se indica en la ficha del producto. Una edición PoD no es equivalente a una edición editorial normal (calidad de papel, encuadernación e impresión).

not sharp grey print on cheap paper

As soon as I finished reading The Book of Love the first time, I simply had to read it again. Leaving the fantastic universe Kelly Link had created was not an option, it was simply impossible. It is books like this that give me back the feeling that it is still possible to create something truley new on the foundations of fanatsy literature. As far from Tolkien and Moorcook as it is possible to get (and I love both of those mentioned!) And now, writing this, I wonder if I might have to embark on the journey through the pages one more time :-)

Read it to the end but found it tedious with too many storylines - maybe it was too deep for my understanding?

The headline tells you all you need to know. Don't read on unless you want to know why.

It’s an interesting observation that among the group of writers known as the New Wave Fabulists, the power of their short stories is rarely matched by their full-length novels. An example is Neil Gaiman: next to his short stories (such as October in the Chair), or, indeed, his graphic works, his novels, despite their inventiveness, seem undemandingly flat.

Kelly Link, another New Wave Fabulist, is a writer of extraordinary ability, unafraid to combine the themes of fables (chiefly, death) with experimental forms so as to achieve an uncanny and compelling dissection of darker aspects of humanity in a manner that equals authors such as Ted Chiang or M John Harrison. The Book of Love is her first novel; can it, unlike Neil Gaiman’s longer works, sustain the power of short stories such as the enticing and disturbing Lull?

In The Book of Love Link uses a pervasive theme of death to explore the ramifications and complexities of love. Her setting, a wild New England coastal location, is straight from the tradition of weird fiction. Her four main protagonists (three of whom, it is quickly revealed, have recently been dead) are high school students about to (or, in one case, not about to) embark on third level education. Their actions and interiority (thoughts, emotions and motivations) are all presented in an engaging and beautifully-written semi-distant style typical of much American literary and speculative fiction. Link also presents viewpoints from many subsidiary characters; in general, the more minor the character, the more distant and authorial the narrative.

Since many of the characters are supernatural villains, they are not displayed by their narratives as sympathetic. Neither, though, are the main protagonists immediately likeable; three of them are judgemental, self-obsessed and callously vindictive borderline narcissists, while the fourth is so self-effacingly helpful as to be frankly irritating. They don’t possess distinct voices and their viewpoints are all presented in the author’s own style, so each of them is promoted as incisively witty to a degree that isn’t completely consistent with how their personalities are otherwise demonstrated.

It’s a measure of Link’s skill that, despite the identical narrative tone of all the main protagonists, they can still be readily distinguished from each other by the reader. The reader in turn is able to develop a modicum of sympathy for most of the characters, although perhaps not sufficient to sustain a novel of this length. There is some degree of character development, but, in the apparently unlikely event that the heroes might prevail, the best that can be hoped for is that they will turn out to be less bad than the baddies.

The villains, on the other hand, are more equivocal. Two of them, although utterly opposed to each other, elicit some reader sympathy from the start. The main villain remains irremediably villainous to the end, but the second most scarily evil character is allowed to demonstrate considerable redeeming features. A further supposedly villainous character remains pretty much neutral all the way through. Another initially minor character who, it turns out, isn’t real at all but a nebulous magical construct, gains more presence towards the end of the book and ends up as perhaps the most rounded personality of all.

There are many risks to spreading a similar narrative style through such a plethora of protagonists. Lacking different voices, the multiple characters tend to dilute progression of plot with the result that reader attention begins to flag shortly before the half-way mark. In addition, by telling the reader too much, Links paradoxically tells us too little. For instance, we learn a bit about the family of a minor character, thus engaging our sympathy, only to hear nothing more about his two young orphans following his death in bizarre circumstances (in this case, reported in a matter-of-fact authorial style).

Ultimately, like another clear comparator and influence (John Crowley’s seminal if flawed Little, Big), the novel (640 pages) is far, far too long. By 80% of the way through the characters are circulating between a limited number of locations in a variety of self-defined morphologies while, despite multiple marvellous and magical events, the dramatic trajectory of the plot has slowed almost to a standstill. Although the finale, while leaving the possibility of future degeneration into chaos open, ties up almost all the loose ends in a way that might be a nod to another minor theme of the novel (a gentle satire on the Romance genre of literature), it remains highly unsatisfying.

This is certainly not a Young Adult book but, at the end of the day, the reader is left in an atmosphere suggestive of teenage vampire fiction (especially, as a critic in the Guardian perceptively indicated, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) rather than New Wave Fabulism. This is not, of course, any kind of criticism of BtVS, a significant artistic endeavour in its own right. Perhaps, I suppose, it could even have been what the author intended.

It’s just not what I was looking for in a novel by Kelly Link.