The Book of Love

September 1, 2023

From the Pulitzer Prize--winning Link, past master of the edgy short story, The Book of Love is a debut novel features three dead teenagers who could return to their seaside Massachusetts lives if they complete a series of magical tasks. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2023
Best known for her magical, whimsical short-story collections such as Get in Trouble (2015) and White Cat, Black Dog (2023), Link now presents an impressively lengthy and wholly immersive debut novel that follows three young people returned from the dead and caught up in an epic supernatural battle. Teens Laura, Daniel, and Mo aren't sure what led to their deaths or why they've been resurrected nearly a year later. They don't know how their high-school music teacher, the unassuming Mr. Anabin, is involved, or the identity of the fourth person who has been brought back with them. Mr. Anabin and his even more mysterious companion, Bogomil, tell them they have a week to unravel the mystery of their deaths and learn how to wield magic. In doing so, two of them will remain alive, and two of them will return to the land of the dead. What follows is a wholly absorbing journey that boasts the hallmarks of Link's shorter fiction while building out a robust cast of characters in the vividly rendered town of Lovesend. At its heart, Link's debut is exactly what the title suggests, a moving and deft exploration of the many ways ""love goes on even when we cannot.

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December 1, 2023
A master of short fantasy offers her long-anticipated first novel. Link has a genius for combining the mundane with the uncanny, diving into the dark currents where dreams grow and bringing up magic-encrusted jetsam, pearlescent ideas that coil and shock. The story takes place in a coastal New England town with the beautifully ambiguous, typically Link name of Lovesend. (Love's end? Love send?) There, four teenagers--sisters Susannah and Laura, their bandmate Daniel, and Susannah's friend Mo--are caught up in a struggle with deities who control access to death. As the book opens, Laura, Daniel, and Mo have been dead for months; in her grief, Susannah smashes her sister's guitar. Soon, the teens, along with a mysterious companion, return from the dead, reanimated by their high school music teacher, Mr. Anabin. Another supernatural person, Bogomil, appears, taking various human and animal forms (a wolf, a rabbit). He writes a message on the music classroom blackboard with his fingernail: "2 RETURN 2 REMAIN." Mr. Anabin gives the revenants a series of tasks, which they believe will allow two of them to stay alive while the other two, they presume, will die again. As they perform the tasks, readers get to know their families and personal struggles: Laura and Susannah's father left the family when they were little, and the two contend with sibling rivalry and family roles (Laura's the good girl, Susannah's the rebel); Daniel, who has a compulsion to be liked, is a loving, caretaking big brother to a gaggle of mixed-race siblings; Mo, a gay orphan and one of the few Black kids in town, has lost his beloved grandmother while he was dead. Meanwhile, increasingly dramatic magical events transform their hometown--the weather goes hot and cold, carousel horses turn into wolves, the goddess of the moon erects a temple in the middle of the bay--as the characters rush endlessly back and forth, arriving at last at an almost mechanically tidy ending. Although all the fabulous Link elements are here, at more than 600 pages, the story is unwieldy and overexplained. This book has many enchantments and moving moments, but it would have been better, and more magical, if it were shorter.

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December 1, 2023

In a small-town high school classroom in the middle of the night, the spirits of three dead students and one interloper have escaped death's realm by methods as mysterious as the cause of their deaths. They are confronted by two equally mysterious beings and a puzzle. Two of them will live, two of them will die, but as they're solving all the riddles, they may reunite with their families. The town has become ground zero for big magic, a place where good and evil, death and chaos, music, and especially love, wreak havoc as the teenagers attempt to unravel the mystery before it unravels them and all they love. Link (White Cat, Black Dog) rewards the patient reader with a surprisingly deep story seen through the myriad perspectives of a small town in the midst of chaos, where every person's life has been skewed by the magic spiraling out around them. VERDICT Lovers of magical coming-of-age stories will find the protagonists' journeys compelling, while anyone who believes that love is the greatest magic of all will find the redemptive power of love (of all types) imbued in every single page.--Marlene Harris

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Starred review from December 18, 2023
Pulitzer finalist Link (White Cat, Black Dog) makes a dazzling full-length debut that proves her gloriously idiosyncratic style shines just as brightly at scale. A year after high schoolers Laura, Daniel, and Mo died, they’re brought back to life (alongside one other, much older ghost) by their band teacher, Mr. Anabin, the unlikely possessor of powerful magic. He and his counterpart, Bogomil, who held the quartet captive in the dark realm of death, decide to play a game. The winners will stay alive; the losers will die once more. To succeed, the teens must learn magic and remember the murky circumstances of their own deaths, all while navigating fraught relationships with loved ones, especially Laura’s temperamental sister, Susannah. For much of the plot, the protagonists are batted about by supernatural forces far larger than themselves, including Anabin, Bogomil, and the glamorous, enigmatic Mallo Mogge. In less capable hands, the amount of uncertainty both characters and readers must endure before answers are revealed might grow frustrating, but Link makes the slow trickle of information both tense and tantalizing. Striking visuals and nimble characterization are delivered with poetry, wry humor, and a remarkable clarity of detail. (Susannah “was a new bruise. The world was always pressing on her”; Laura “was practically a gothic piñata stuffed with bone shards, dead rabbits, secrets so secret not even she understood them.”) Link dexterously somersaults between tonal registers—from playfully whimsical (love and magic are both explained via a comparison to asparagus) to hair-raising and uncanny (a cat goes from grooming itself to devouring itself whole)—without ever missing a step. This is a masterpiece.