Emily Vance Brown

by Kelly Link

3/5

I read The Book of Love at the recommendation of a friend, and although my review leans towards the more negative side, I’m still glad I did. The novel’s plot is incredible—three teenagers come back from the dead under mysterious circumstances (after an even more mysterious disappearance) and are tasked with completing a series of challenges to remain in the mortal world. 

What I liked: I’m a huge fan of magical realism, and this story revolved around a fascinating premise. It has its own universe with its own lore, and I loved piecing together the details. 

What I disliked:

Characters: I’m usually a fan of a large cast of characters (see my review of Cloud Cuckoo Land from two weeks ago), but the array of characters in The Book of Love didn’t work for me. I found myself being drawn more to the side characters, Ruth, than to the primary characters like Laura and Daniel. 

By the end of the story, I didn’t feel like I had any better understanding of the characters’ motivations and personalities than I did at the beginning. Laura, Daniel, Susannah, and Mo undergo incredible transformations in this book—aside from literally coming back from the dead, they learn how to practice magic, meet otherworldly immortal beings, lose loved ones, transform into animals, have memories wiped and replaced, and much more. And yet, somehow, they remain pretty much the same from beginning to end. If this had been a much shorter novel, the absence of these character dynamics and growth would have made more sense to me and could have even added to the magical intrigue of the story, but for a book of 600 pages the absence of character development was stark and disappointing. 

Pacing: related to the length, I generally felt like the pacing was stilted and inconsistent. The first half of the book dragged on in a way that would have made me consider abandoning it if it hadn’t been a recommendation. Some of the background information was important, yes, but overall, there was just too much of everything to sustain my interest throughout the whole novel. By the second half, the pace picked up, but by that point, I felt so tired of trying to follow the story for no narrative reward that it was difficult to reinstate my interest. 

Title: I don’t know a kinder way to say it—the title was a terrible choice. It does not connect to anything in the novel until the last few pages, not even in the broadest metaphorical sense, and even then, it’s an extremely loose and random connection. From a bookseller’s perspective, the title also makes it difficult to hand-sell this book even for readers who might genuinely like it, as it comes across like it’s going to fall in the romantasy or self-help genres.