Book Review: “The Book of Love” by Kelly Link
Who Wrote the Book of Love?
When I was writing fiction some 25 years ago, Kelly Link was making a name for herself as a short story writer at the same time I was trying to (though I wasn’t making that much of a name for myself as it would turn out). Her latest book, The Book of Love, is her first novel. For that reason, and the length of time between her debut short story collection and The Book of Love, for anyone to say that this novel is highly anticipated would be a massive understatement. What’s more, Link has gone big and not gone home with this one: her debut novel runs some 640 pages! It is a massive undertaking to read, and anyone interested in reading this might want to take a few sick days off work or school to get through it. As the protagonists are teenagers, this might be classified as being a young adult novel, or a book for the young at heart, at least. However, with all of this said and unpacked, The Book of Love has been getting mixed early reviews from the major U.S. book publishing trade publications. Kirkus Reviews says “This book has many enchantments and moving moments, but it would have been better, and more magical, if it were shorter.” Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly trumpets this work as a “masterpiece.” “Link dexterously somersaults between tonal registers — from playfully whimsical (love and magic are both explained via a comparison to asparagus) to hair-raising and uncanny (a cat goes from grooming itself to devouring itself whole) — without ever missing a step,” says the latter publication in addition. So which one is correct? Well, it’s a matter of it being a little bit of Column A and a little bit of Column B.
The book is about three young friends or classmates — Laura, Daniel, and Mo — who have died but have been resurrected by their high school music teacher, Mr. Anabin. Anabin is a kind of wizard along with a man-animal named Bogomil, who both come up with a game for the teenagers to play. The kids must go on a quest to figure out how to use the magic they have been imbued with as reanimated figures. Two of the friends will be allowed to live, and the other two (another teen named Bowie has been reanimated but is of no relation to the others) will be sent back to the realm of the dead. Much of the book, then, details the travails of these youth as they fight to reclaim the lives they had before they died. From there, the characters pile up and the magic realism elements come into play as the teens make their way to becoming magicians who may or may not be tasked with guarding the otherworld as a “reward” for their efforts.
On the plus side, this is a highly creative and unusual book. Especially early on, this reads like an adult version (or young adult version) of the Harry Potter series. The whole book feels as though the author was making the story up as she went along, so the plot keeps you on your toes. It also helps that there are some appealing queer main characters in this, which is a refreshing change of pace from such characters usually taking more of a backseat in popular fiction. The book additionally can be read as a coming-of-age story as the main characters come to grips with both sex and death. And, getting back to the characters for a moment, they feel very real: there are children in the book who act like real children and not as a stilted version of adults. All in all, I’m pretty sure that fans of Link’s previous work will be pleased and will lap this up. However, the book is also Way. Too. Long. You could easily omit the mid-section of the book, which is boring and not particularly plot-heavy, and wouldn’t lose too much of the spell of enchantment that this novel casts. Another deficiency is that Link tends to overexplain things. Something will happen, and then a character will explain what has just happened to another character when it has already been explained. Link also drops a few balls in juggling temporal space: action will happen, and then the proceeding chapter will go back to before that action, but from another character’s point of view — which makes for a bit of a confusing muddle.
That all said, The Book of Love is a novel that has all of the hallmarks of a book written by someone who has been best known up until now as a writer of short stories. Going back to the review in Kirkus, Link could have benefitted from an editor with a stronger hand. Still, I don’t want to be churlish as Link is an intriguing writer and highly — to borrow a word from one of those reviews — uncanny fabulist. In some ways, she is one of the very best writers we have working in the field of magic realism. She promises in the acknowledgments of this novel that her next one will be shorter, so The Book of Love might be a case of a writer ironing out the lumps and figuring out how to best write a novel. I am confident that — when it comes to the subject of novel-based work — Kelly Link can only get better from here, and here’s to hoping that her next book doesn’t take 25 years to write. While The Book Of Love didn’t need to be told on an epic scale, it is an epic story of both love and magic and is an agreeable enough palate cleanser for more of the same. I’m looking forward to what might be next from the pen of Link but hope that the sophomore novel doesn’t turn out to be difficult. However, as the winner of a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant,” Link has already proven she is one of a kind, so I am hopeful that Link can only get better from here — the only way forward is up — and that The Book of Love is just a middling novel written by someone learning how to write one.
Kelly Link’s The Book of Love will be published by Random House on February 13, 2024.
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