(no subject)

[skygiants]

Sometimes I get a six hundred page book out of the library and it comes in hardcover, and I look at it and go, "oh no, I will not be able to be fair to this book in my heart, because my arms will be Too Tired." And indeed I read it and spend the entire time going "this book could have been shorter! we didn't need that scene!"

And sometimes I get a six hundred page book out of the library and I feel not a JOT of resentment because I do believe that every one of those six hundred pages provided a necessary and valuable contribution. Kelly Link's The Book of Love takes maybe a hundred pages to get through the first full day of its plot in which almost nothing happens after the major inciting incident, and yeah, it did need all hundred of those pages, actually. I don't know what to tell you.

The inciting incident of The Book of Love is that teenaged Laura, Daniel, and Mo, who have been missing -- dead? -- for a year, are suddenly (temporarily?) alive again, thanks to their music teacher who was always apparently supernatural, and always apparently locked in a power struggle with Bogomil, whose realm they have just escaped along with an extremely weird stranger they call Bowie. Their music teacher tells them all, including Bowie, to figure out what happened the night they died, and to try to do some magic, before sending them all home.

Also, everyone in their life, who has been grieving them for a year, now instead believes that they spent the last year on an exchange study program in Ireland.

Also, the music class blackboard bears the message TWO RETURN, TWO REMAIN. Which is probably fine.

So they go home, to families whose houses and minds have the marks of a year of grief that they now don't remember, and try and figure out how and whether they could and should do magic.

There's plot that happens from there, around Bogomil and the music teacher and the powerful and amoral Malo Mogge who shows up shortly thereafter, trapped fifteenth-century Thomas in tow, to fill the town with increasingly terrifying surrealism. The plot is IMO the least successful and important part of the book except that it provides a vehicle through which to pick up different characters and relationships and hold them up to the light for a moment -- Laura and Daniel and Mo and Laura's sister Susannah, the link between these people and the one who did not die, and their parents and siblings and friends and part-time job bosses and high school crushes, and those people's parents and siblings and friends, all moving through grief and change and figuring out what they want to be to each other. This is a book driven by a community and the people in it and their relationships to each other much more than it's driven by impending magical peril, and I think this is a feature and not a bug. At one point Laura and Daniel go to a bar, and then we spend two pages in the POV of the bar's owner, learning about her relationship with her father and how she came to run a bar that has a working carousel; none of that is important, except in the way that it's important. Then Malo Mogge turns the bar owner into a tiger, which you would think would be more important to the book than learning about how much she loved her father, but not really. 'The Book of Love' is a big claim. I don't think every part of this book succeeds at all things, but broadly, I think it fulfills the brief. I liked it very much and I was glad for all the pages that it had, even when my arms were tired of carrying them.

(As a sidenote, if I had to guess, I would lay a small amount of money that S5-6 of Buffy was one of the kernels of inspiration for this book -- the strangeness of returning from the dead! sisters appearing and disappearing out of nothing and how you love them anyway! Your High School Teacher Is Part Of A Long Supernatural War! -- which is very funny because in terms of tone and pacing it is the exact opposite of monster of the week. We will NOT be telling ANY stories in forty minutes. Get comfy! Settle in!)

Comments

[sophia_sol]

"This is a book driven by a community and the people in it and their relationships to each other much more than it's driven by impending magical peril, and I think this is a feature and not a bug. At one point Laura and Daniel go to a bar, and then we spend two pages in the POV of the bar's owner, learning about her relationship with her father and how she came to run a bar that has a working carousel; none of that is important, except in the way that it's important."

ok this is very compelling to me! though the 600 pages of it perhaps slightly less so

[skygiants]

it's a maximalist book ... but in this case a feature, IMO, not a bug. I had to put it down to read my week's DWJ and normally that is not a problem for me but in this case I did want to go back to it!

[sovay]

the powerful and amoral Malo Mogge who shows up shortly thereafter, trapped fifteenth-century Thomas in tow

I have to ask if the spine of this part is Tom o' Bedlam.

[skygiants]

not explicitly -- the Thomas is a bit more Tam Lin, but honestly mostly I think it's just Conglomorate Hot Thomas Who's Made Bad Bargains With Faerie. you know that guy. tell your Thomases to stay away from strange rituals probably. Malo Mogge might be a nod, but she's certainly not a corruption of Mary Magdalene.

[sovay]

not explicitly -- the Thomas is a bit more Tam Lin, but honestly mostly I think it's just Conglomorate Hot Thomas Who's Made Bad Bargains With Faerie. you know that guy. tell your Thomases to stay away from strange rituals probably.

They keep not! I'm always reading books about it! (I adore, however, your phrasing.)

Malo Mogge might be a nod, but she's certainly not a corruption of Mary Magdalene.

The cover design made me think of "the book of moons"/"the moon's my constant mistress," which in conjunction with an antique Tom made me ask. Good to know!

[skygiants]

AJ:LKDFSDJF I FORGOT ABOUT THE MOON. you're absolutely right it is a Tom O'Bedlam riff, Malo Mogge is one thousand percent moon-associated.

[sovay]

AJ:LKDFSDJF I FORGOT ABOUT THE MOON. you're absolutely right it is a Tom O'Bedlam riff, Malo Mogge is one thousand percent moon-associated.

Right: I shall read this six-hundred-page book. (That's amazing.)

[slashmarks]

This sounds like a lot of fun, I'll have to check it out!

[skygiants]

I hope you dig it if you do!

[chestnut_pod]

I feel like I need some maximalist communitarianism right about now!

[skygiants]

EXTREMELY interested in your thoughts if you read.

[chestnut_pod]

Waiting for a hold slot to open up (the horror of my Libby is not to be understated…) but will make sure to prioritize!

[starlady]

To me it felt like taking a beach vacation that dragged on too long. I enjoyed it, but by the last few days I was ready to go home. I think you're right it's a book about community, but I got very bored of reading endless extraneous details in the middle until the plot kicked in.

I also couldn't help but notice that despite being ostentatiously set in 2014 there are references to TikTok. To me this is another sign that it needed one more edit.

[skygiants]

I was honestly surprised that I did not get bored, I fully expected to, but I really didn't! I was excited to get back to it every time I picked it up.

[qian]

I felt quite similarly to you about the book, but just a bit different -- I didn't feel the book technically needed the first hundred pages, and could see how a ruthless structural edit or two would have improved it, but I still loved reading it all and had no complaints. It did feel like Link was almost kind of hampered by having to do a plot, maybe literary fanfic of S5-6 Buffy would have worked better for her as a genre??

[skygiants]

Yeah I agree, the parts when I was least invested was when the book was trying to explain the mechanisms of the plot to me and frankly I didn't really care who ended up filling what mythic role at the end, the parts I liked most were the detailed explorations of how each specific kid reacted differently to their weird circumstances and how they related to their family and friends and so on. Perhaps literary fanfic would have worked better!

[qian]

The thing is, I feel Link is at that stage of her career where she can pretty much do anything she wants, so if she'd wanted to do a plot-free literary fanfic she could have done. But my sense is she just really wanted to do her own version of the kind of Pamela Dean style of urban fantasy where some young Americans run into Celtic myth. It felt to me like that kind of book, but upmarket, if that makes sense.

[seekingferret]

It reminded me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, not in the sense that it was anything like that book but in the sense that it had its own, very singular storytelling logic and as long as I was reading it, I had to live in its storytelling logic. To me the length was much more about that than whether the story needed it- as long as I was reading, I had to keep worrying about what would happen to the tigers. And I wanted to keep worrying about the tigers.

[obopolsk]

I have had this book out from the school library since...possibly before summer break? And have entirely failed to read it because the size of the hardcover made my arms hurt just looking at it. But this post is making me feel renewed enthusiasm about picking it up, so thank you for that!