Review: The Book of Love

1/5 star

The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (2024)

This should have been a short story. Instead it was SIX HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE PAGES.

I enjoyed Link's quirky book of short stories, Magic for Beginners - creative little dramas about witches and zombies, and a lot of interesting interactions between the world of the living and the world of the dead. I was curious to see what her first full length novel would bring. It did bring a lot more of that fuzzy line between life and death. Unfortunately, what it also brought is clarity that Link should stick to the short-story form. And she needs an editor who can tell her when to stop.

Three teenagers, Lauren, Daniel, and Mo, awake abruptly at their high school with no memory of where they've been for the past year. They know they disappeared, and have been presumed dead. And, in fact, they have been dead. And ARE dead still, but also returned from the dead. There is also one other who has returned unexpectedly, but does not know their own identity. Their former music teacher, who it seems is some kind of magical being, sets them with a series of tasks to hone their burgeoning magical skills. In the meantime, they return to their families, whose memories have been altered to think they were studying abroad in Ireland for the past year. Two will "win" and get to stay alive. Two will have to return to the land of the dead. There are lots of other side characters, including family members as well as other magical beings who are drawn to the town.

Sounds ok so far, right? The problems are...

Every single character is annoying, and either has very few redeemable qualities or has basically no semblance of a personality. Every single thing they do is explained in unnecessary detail, and repeated over and over. The chapters alternate between narrators, and so we get the same story told again and again, but without anything interesting about a new perspective. There are too many characters to keep straight, and none of them feel worth listening to anyway.

"The characters feel like they're being dragged through the book against their will." (from another Goodreads reviewer)

The plot feels tortured, like Link had a great idea and then for some reason thought it had to be stretched and mangled to fit a word count of over 100,000. The dialogue is confusing and flat. The narrative itself makes no sense, and the timeline sometimes jumps back without making it clear where and when we are now.

It also seemed like Link was trying to "write a Black character" just to, perhaps, fulfill a diversity requirement? It didn't feel thoughtfully done. Just a white woman trying to get inside the head of some Black kids. The novel is poorly constructed, inadequately developed, and just generally... kinda sucks. Sad to say this, because Link's short story writing is sharp and inventive. Some people should stick to their lanes, I guess.

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UP NEXT: The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett