Much like with other Kelly Link works I have read in the past, I feel like the writing is there, but I always feel as though there is a lack of substance or themes behind them - and with an almost 700 pages book, I really felt as though the overall goal for the novel was lacking. I found the writing in the book to move with the flow of the story; it felt as though I was reading a fairy tale which went well with the vibes of the book and its ending. I found some of the characters to be charming and I genuinely cared about what would happen to them (or what did happen to them) but it took more than 50% of the book for me to do so. The first half of this book was a slog to get through and I think it really contributed to a reading slump. I didn't find there to be much going on within the plot, and given the synopsis, I was shocked that I didn't care as much as I feel I should have. I think if the plot in this was more engaging or tighter, it would have been a more enjoyable book.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC. I could not finish this book. I read over 150 pages and could not follow some of the characters, main characters yes, ancillary characters no.

When I heard that speculative-short-story-GOAT Kelly Link had written a doorstopper of a debut novel, I was ALL IN. This won’t be for everyone, but this was extremely my thing.

What a beautiful story to get lost in. Life, death, music, love, sacrifice, friendship, siblinghood, grief; this one has it all. Also plenty of the uncanny. Also a villain who is the moon, but also death, kind of? I mean, what’s not to love. And yes, it’s about four teenagers, but they are so vivid and real, don’t let that deter you, even if you usually have trouble relating to teenage characters.

Some will say this was too long, but the length didn’t bother me at all. I loved all the time we spent getting to really know these characters and see each of their individual lives. As Alix Harrow said: “Is it ‘slow’? Sure. Yeah. So is spring. So is a sunset. So is sex, if you're doing it right, and death, if you're lucky. Some things are meant to be savored.” I couldn’t agree more.

So, I have "paused" this book at over 50% in because I don't dislike it but also it feels like nothing has happened? The writing is great, I was instantly hooked, and the premise was so exciting. But I'm over 300 pages in and I feel like NOTHING has happened since the first 50 pages. And I just don't have it in me right now? I bought this book, and want to finish it. But also reading this book has put me into a slump and I am frustrated by it. Do something with your incredible premise! I want to know what happens! But I can't read 600+ pages about teenagers who are just way cooler than I was as a teen doing average teenager things! Really hoping that I can get back to this in a few weeks and rate it higher.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

While the premise for this book sounds very interesting it veers off course pretty quickly. It is waaay toooooo long. If I was told I’d had to figure out how to do some magic to keep from going to hell I’d get on it!!! DNF after about 30%

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

The Book of Love by Kelly Link is a slower paced contemporary fantasy told in multiple POVs. Laura, Daniel, and Mo are dead until they aren’t. Brought back to their hometown, they need to remember how they ended up dead and communicate with the beings that brought them back to life as well as deal with the people they left behind.

Susannah and Daniel’s messy relationship was probably one of my favorite dynamics in the book. I love a romance where two people want to choose each other but aren’t quite sure how to make it work. Susannah was also probably my second favorite POV for her snark and how view of how Daniel, Laura, and Mo are acting.

Mo was my favorite POV. It’s very easy to get absorbed by his voice and his story, from how referential he can be, to how connected he was to his grandmother, to his complicated feelings towards everyone else, he’s a delight to see on the page.

The Book of Love is Kelly Link’s debut and it’s really a web of different characters and their relationships with each other slowly making themselves more apparent to the obvious. Kelly Link knows how to keep things close to the chest and when to reveal other things as well as how to make characters feel real and human and alive.

I would recommend this to readers looking for slower paced contemporary fantasies, fans of Kelly Link’s short stories, and readers of fantasy who like multi-POV stories.

This has all the things that I love about Kelly Link. It’s smart, funny, messy, a little gross, a little scary, but I think in this case, she gave me a little bit too much too love.

I thought this was a really well rounded novel. The overall aspect of magical realism/fantasy was what I assumed would hold my attention throughout but it was that AND the in depth look into each of the characters. I found myself at the end of a chapter thinking I’d take a break and just couldn’t. I wanted to see what would happen next. The fantasy alone was an interesting premise but truly the characters lives though family, friendship, grief and love were so beautiful to the book.

I wound up loving this book and this world but I will say that it took me a little bit into it to find the rhythm and really fall into the story. Once I did, I couldn’t stop reading and was overwhelmed by the writing and the characters.

I was granted an advance copy by Netgalley & the publisher and I was so excited to read and review this one.

I loved the premise of this book. It sounded interesting and I was excited to get started. It was definitely not what I expected. For me, the best way to describe this book is as the love child of Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth and American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I’m not sure everyone else (or anyone else) would agree, but it definitely gave me vibes of both books at different times and sometimes simultaneously.

When I started, it took me awhile to get used to Link’s stream of consciousness-esque writing and the fever dream of the goings on. At times, it veers towards magical realism instead of fantasy, which isn’t usually my jam, but the writing was so beautiful and clever that I just fell in love with it. Once the writing hooked me, I started to enjoy annotating the book with my thoughts about the unraveling mysteries and my hopes for the characters’ journeys. I fell in love with a few of the characters, and some I hated, but they were all fleshed out and well written.

The book alternates between points of view of the main characters, as well as occasional chapters from minor characters’ points of view, which usually brings new perspective to something someone else has already told us. No narrator is wholly reliable, and the constantly shifting perspectives added to the fever dream quality of the narrative, but also constantly helped the story evolve. Another thing I loved about the characters, especially Mo, is the snark that some of them had. There were so many times I chuckled out loud, or texted my best friend some of the dialogue so they could laugh with me. It brought some joy to a rather bleak at times story.

My one critique of this book is that after a drawn out first half of the book, the end seemed to come very rapidly and perhaps not as satisfying as the rest of the book. Some people might not enjoy the pacing of the first half, but personally I loved ambling around in this world and with the characters so that I could get to know them well and sink in to the writing. I just wish the rest of the book would have been able to maintain that kind of pace, while also providing a satisfying ending. Regardless, this was one journey I am so glad I took, especially because it made me broaden some of my reading horizons. I’m excited to look into Link’s short story collections as well because her writing is just so scrumptious.

Kelly Link brings the same spookiness that pervades her shorts stories to this novel. Recommended for anyone who like Kelly Link and weird horror fiction.

This book was a struggle for me to get into. I found the narrative to be too mismatched for my personal tastes but I can see myself recommending it to readers who like fantasy/magical realism with a focus on family and found family.

I was excited to read this one! The blurb was super intriguing. It was listed as anticipated sci-fi release as well as the first full length novel from a popular short story author. I'm not well versed in this genre but all these factors made me ready to dive in! I was not disappointed. It's definitely a slow burn, plot wise, and had me scratching my head a lot, but in the best way. Things don't piece together until the end which I enjoy! It's no fun having it all figured out in the beginning, just enjoy the ride.

I think Kelly did an amazing job writing interesting characters that also made sense as teenagers. Sibling rivalry, young and confusing love, the road to discovering who you are, etc were all touched on in a great way while mixing in the weird and extraordinary. I really enjoyed this!

Thanks Netgalley/Random House for the copy in exchange for an honest review.

The long awaited Book of Love is the debut novel by author Kelly Link, best known for her fantastical short stories. Much like her other works. The Book of Love falls into the category of magical realism or slipstream, where the characters move through time and space but the settings are familiar and known. In the story: Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are.

With them in the room is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of the bargain their music teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.

I found the premise intriguing and wanted to be drawn in, which the first few chapters do. However, as chapter after chapter wore on, and I was introduced to character after character, I began to feel less drawn in and less intrigued. There is A LOT to wade through and much of it feels unnecessary to the story. The chapters are short and detailed, with just enough to draw you in but then ends on a cliffhanger before moving you to the POV of yet another character....and there are many characters and points of view. After a while the book felt like a tedious slog, a bit like being edged, despite the beautiful, poetic, and vividly descriptive prose. As one who reads book straight through, I had a very difficult time doing so with this book. I put it down and picked it up again more that I like. I did enjoy the ending but feel that we could have arrived at the same place with 100 fewer pages.

If you like magical realism and have time and patience, then this book might be for you. What I would really like is to see this book as a movie. On screen, the story would be visually stunning and the telling of it, over a multi-part series would do this book justice. (I say this as one who is oftern skeptical of books being turned into movies)

3.75 ☆

30, 50, even 100 pages in, i couldn't make sense of why this book had a low(ish, 3.50+ isn't bad at all!) average rating, because it seemed great to me. however, by the time i finished it, i got it. i still liked it quite a lot, and i am sure i will think about it for a long time, ruminating over every little detail and wondering if i understood everything correctly. but i can't blame the people who didn't love it.

for one, it's so damn long. there's only so much you can drag a story onward without it really going anywhere before it becomes unbearably repetitive. maybe it wasn't exactly unbearable, but there were a few—okay, plenty—of times towards the end where i just kept going because i couldn't wait to be done with it, because for so long the story stalled that i just needed it to end. i was lucky that i liked the beginning so much that i was invested enough to want to see it through, was curious about where the characters were going to end up, but i can imagine how tiresome it must have been for people who didn't feel the same way.

secondly, while i wasn't completely disappointed by it, i didn't find the ending to be satisfactory, either. not to sound like a broken record, but after 640 pages, instead of using at least 200 of them up to run in circles, i think we could've come up with something better than what actually happened, i don't know. maybe i'm just bitter because i didn't like the fate of some of the characters. or maybe i'm not, i'm being very objective in saying that the plot sort of... lost the plot, pun intended.

but it wasn't all terrible, quite the opposite. i really liked the writing, especially the parts that reminded me of a stream of consciousness, jumping from one thought to the next and feeling like you were right inside the characters' brain. i loved some of the characters, alas not all of them, and i loved exploring the relationships that bound them to one another.

i reserve the right to change my mind over the course of the next week as i spend my days obsessively trying to understand whether i really really liked this book as a whole or if i just liked some parts of it so much that i feel like i have to be kind to its entirety. i don't know and i think this review shows, lol

thank you to PRH International for the book!

Link's imaginative abilities and playfulness make for successful short stories, but this novel fails to satisfy. It is very meandering and far too long, often over-complicated. The dialogue felt performative and stilted and the character voices weren't distinct. Again, this works well in a short story: very polished and deliberate speech patterns that might feel like a fairytale, but it didn't work well in a novel where I needed to believe in the teenagers at the heart of the story. (And I'm all for precocious teens, don't get me wrong.) I'd looked forward to this book but found it hard to get through because the plot didn't advance quickly and because the author seemed to get in the way of her writing somehow. It was so set on being unorthodox and whimsical that it couldn't find the beating heart of the story.

I ended up a bit disappointed by this one. Going in, the premise really grabbed me. It sounded both mysterious and magical to me. In the end, I think the book was trying too hard to do too many things. Some of the story fell flat and didn’t have a satisfying wrap up. The characters needed some work too. That being said, I would definitely pick up other work from this author because with ideas like this she can only get better

I mean, Kelly Link is a genius. Surely we all knew that already. The Book of Love will stay with me for the rest of my life, the way the best, most beautiful novels always do. Dreamlike, mythic, gorgeous... the kind of thing it feels like a privilege to read.

This novel is only for some, so if you're expecting a fast, fluffy read that is merely plot-driven, then it's not for you, BUT it is precisely the kind of novel I love. It's weird. It has so many moments of "Wait, what?" I can't wait for a friend or two to read it because I need to discuss it.
I loved it for several reasons. First, the writing is enchanting. I pride myself on being a "fast" reader but I had to slow down and "sip" Link's prose. I've written down SO many quotes (and have even used a couple of them as mini mentor text in teaching). "Every footfall was a strike on a bell stopped with mud. A clot of blood trembling on a rusted wire" (The Book of Love Kelly Link). How VIVID. The imagery is such that I often found myself re-reading excerpts, but slower so I could savour word choice.
Second, I became so attached to the characters, especially Mo. He made me laugh; he made me cry. He made me wonder what choices I would have made if I were in his shoes.
Third, the plot is intricate, twisty, and filled with suspense, humour, shock, and a plethora of WTF moments.
I loved the elements of allegory, which lent themselves so wonderfully to the revelation of themes. What would I do if I was capable of magic? What would I do if I realized the manifestation of my dream was not real and I had to send it away? What would I do with responsibility beyond my imagination when I had NO life experience?
Loved it. It's not a fast, fluffy read; I had to take my time and read it carefully to appreciate the author's story.
Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for the Copy.

Reading this book was like entering a dream world. It was immersive, atmospheric, haunting... but also slow, confusing, lacking a narrative I could grip onto. It was beautifully executed, hard put down, but also hard to pick up. A book of contradictions. For the right reader, I think it will sing.