Review copy provided by the publisher.
Look, friends, this felt so comfortable, okay? This felt like–of course, of course this is what reading a Kelly Link novel feels like, haven’t I been doing this for years? I haven’t? It’s her first go at it? Really? Oh. So is it a novella, then, or a near-novella, sort of a stepping stone to dabble her toes into the land of novel? Nnnnnope it is an entire bugcrusher, it has the room to have secondary characters and subplots and texture to the setting.
So. Three young people disappear for a year from a small coastal Massachusetts town. This is not a thriller, it is a fantasy novel, so it’s not a great surprise that when the early reveal is that they’ve been dead all that year, they’re back, more or less intact, confused, interacting with magics they don’t entirely understand. Their high school music teacher seems to be at the center of it, but the more they learn, the less his centrality seems sure.
Of the three of them–Daniel, Laura, and Mo–two have lives that can fold them back into the magical explanation given by their music teacher for their absence. But Laura’s sister Susannah is not so easily swayed. Though she can’t quite place what’s wrong with the spell that’s cast on her, she knows something is–and she keeps circling around those memories and those feelings, trying to figure out what isn’t adding up. As Daniel, Laura, and Mo–and the other supernatural beings in their orbit–hurry to settle their relationships with life, death, this world, the next, and magic itself, before a disastrous figure brings catastrophe to all they love, Susannah keeps finding pieces of the answer to what really happened a year ago. And it’s her relationship with them, and their relationships with each other, that prove crucial in that answer.
We get time with each of the major characters, and many of the minor ones too. When one twist arose I knew immediately who it applied to and gasped “OH YOU HAD BETTER NOT,” not because it was predictable but because there was a tidal inevitability. But each crash of the tide in this book revealed something else fascinating on the shore, a new piece of glass or gnarled wood washed up its characters’ emotional lives, and the final resolution was one I could accept as satisfying even with some heartbreak along the way. As who would not expect heartbreak in a book of this title, this woven with life and death–and families? The main characters of The Book of Love are mainly achingly young, but Link doesn’t make the mistake of imagining young people to exist in some kind of youthful isolation. Each one is a grandchild, a child, a sibling, a friend, an employee, all things that turn out to matter crucially to their lives. It’s not The Book of [Romantic] Love, it’s just The Book of Love, wholeheartedly. Or as whole as hearts can remain in the land of the living, where there is suffering and loss. But it’s a much better book for all of these things being part of it, for taking the time and the space to allow these things to be part of it. I really loved this. I’m glad to have made a start on the years of reading Kelly Link novels.