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Dec. 28th, 2024 03:59 pmSometimes 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!)
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!)
