Zevin knows the book-selling business, the overly optimistic sales reps, the neighborhood book clubs and the desperate spirit of the bricks-and-mortar store filled with bound books in the digital age. What distinguishes this romance is its setting. A few genuinely grim moments (death appears frequently and suddenly) are leavened by the animating spirit behind the whole, a light tone marked by earnestness, a straightforward approach to love and joy, and a felicitous charm.
There’s a prize-winning story within the novel written by a well-read high-school freshman in a style that feels just a shade off.Įverything is explained, and all the loose ends are tied up with a bow. Here and there, one’s suspension of disbelief is tested. “The Storied Life” zips by, paced by a few unexpected turns and complications, and any potholes in the plot are quickly smoothed over. Zevin has published seven books, including five for young adults, and it shows. He quickly figures out that books and reading can bind lives as surely as any shared love. A little bundle of joy and redemption changes his life forever.
Into the slough of despond he tumbles, until something - or someone - unexpected shows up in the sparsely stocked children’s section. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t get a lot of customers and has few friends, and in the space of the first few chapters, his most valuable possession, a first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “ Tamerlane,” is stolen. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and - I imagine this goes without saying - vampires.” I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying.
I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be - basically gimmicks of any kind. . . “I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. He doesn’t just stock any old book in Island Books, where “No Man Is an Island Every Book Is a World.” Only those titles that satisfy his old-fashioned tastes are allowed in: Depressed for the past two years following the death of his wife, Fikry is lonesome, angry and a bit of a literary snob. Fikry” is about a middle-aged man who owns a failing independent bookstore on Alice Island off the coast of Massachusetts.
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