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lizshayne 's review for:

The Book of Love by Kelly Link
3.5
challenging dark reflective tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

I liked this book a lot and also I wanted to love it and mostly just...liked it.
What Link does so well in her short stories is make fairy tale logic operate in the real world in a way that keeps the latter under the auspices of the former. What frustrates me about this book is that I'm not sure that fairy tales were meant to be 600+ pages long. Some of that might be that Link exceeded the amount of time I was willing to be confused before the plot kicked in and some of it might just be that she's an exquisite short story writer and a good novelist.
And yet it's weird and so much of it is wonderful and the structure fascinates me and yet I still didn't adore it the way I wanted to.