Review by sunn_bleach - The Book of Love

sunn_bleach 's review for:

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

1.0

mysterious slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This has been a year for some of the best books I've ever read and some of the worst books I've ever read. This firmly falls in the latter category. I'd been interested in this book since reading some of Link's short stories and generally enjoying them (to say nothing of her Pulitzer Prize finalist status), and magical realism small-town stories are more or less half of what I read anyway.

The book takes place in the small town of Lovesend, Massachusetts within the USA. Three teenagers are brought back to life by their music teacher, and they're given three days and three tasks to prove which of the two will stay alive and which of the two will die. Oh, and copious amounts of teen drama, because why not?

There's a pervasive sense of smugness to this book that feels like it's not simply "shitty teenagers being shitty". There are too many faux-progressive wish fulfillment that calls to mind the worst of some of my grad student cohort that was more interested in putting you down than raising people up, and much of Link's omniscient narrative voice was nails on a chalkboard to me.
The worst example of the above is when one of our characters pulls off the ultimate cringeworthy wish fulfillment. She goes to a guitar store where a middle-aged male clerk is a stereotypical music snob a la High Fidelity. She uses her magic not only to get a free guitar, but also forces our shiteating clerk to "only listen to female guitarists". At one point, a character says that's not a good thing, but it's meekly dismissed and never brought up again. It's hard not to read that as Link nodding approvingly from behind a keyboard.
Mo has no personality whatsoever outside of "ugh, white people." It's incredibly cringy and pretty uncomfortable to read from a white female author; if Link was attempting to capture the internal racial tension of a black boy living in a nigh-all white town, she failed.
I don't give a fuck about the teenage romance drama. Link hits you over the head over and over again with "omg Daniel kissed Susannah" and it barely pays off. There's such an overwhelming focus on teen drama that is not only incredibly boring to read, but it feels absolutely ridiculously silly given these kids just came back from life and go back to being Sims characters. Oh, is the point of your book that these kids are boring? Well that's fine... but you still had me read about boring characters, didn't you?
Speaking of the above, there's a distinct lack of tension, and even the tension that does occur never really feels "real". There are times when the kids are told of how there's an existential threat fast approaching, they go "omg", and then we're back to "Daniel kissed Susannah!!!!!" as if nothing happened. It's like I'm reading the magical realism equivalent of Shenmue - there's a cutscene about how terrible everything is, but gameplay is just knocking on locked doors. There's no stakes to this book that's ostensibly nothing but stakes.
Despite one of the four teens being basically a shapeshifting ghost who was caught in a shadow realm for hundreds of years, Link completely sidelines this character in favor of continually telling us who kissed whom. It's massively frustrating to have your most interesting character be little more than a sidepiece.
The book fails in the "let's make things obfuscated for plot reasons" nonsense as opposed to a cohesive story. Many of the early occurrences (such as an ominous "2 remain, 2 stay" on chalkboard) make no sense with further revelations, as if the author and editor just kinda forgot about them. It's X-Files style of storytelling: make the overarching antagonist just needlessly obtuse, then that fills in as mystery.
Link makes the older millennial author mistake of being far too detailed about teenage sex scenes. Yes, teens have sex. No, we don't need a paragraph of detail about how hard a 16 year old's penis is. It wasn't cool when Stephen King did it, either.
Link occasionally gives us random backstories to extremely minor characters that are supposedly meant to give us more pathos for the citizens of Lovesend, but they're done haphazardly and break the flow of the novel. The only good one of these was Mo's grandmother, but in retrospect it evinces Link's true strength in short stories and feels cloyingly out-of-place in a novel of this size.

I very strongly do not recommend this book and find it kind of impressive in how much it made me mad after the fact. I wouldn't say I'm glad I read it, but I am appreciative of how for that full 628 pages I was thinking about why it didn't work for me and making sure I pulled out concrete examples to remember. And I'm going to be highly skeptical of any other book from Link, which is a disappointing thing to say.

Content Warnings