An outsize novel ... In her prose, matter becomes plastic, bodies melt, and the membrane separating reality from fantasy is beaten to airy thinness. This is a novel in which statues come to life and people become statues ... Surreal moments keep flying through this story as hypnotically as starlings at twilight, but such dazzlement proves difficult to maintain. Eventually, the novel’s most magical quality seemed to be that every time I picked it up, it had grown longer.
Long, but never boring ... Reviewing The Book of Love feels like trying to describe a dream. It’s profoundly beautiful, provokes intense emotion, offers up what feel like rooted, incontrovertible truths — but as soon as one tries to repeat them, all that’s left are shapes and textures, the faint outlines of shifting terrain ... So much of Link’s work steps lightly, a tempering of the commonplace with vivid, delicate surprise ... Its composition, its copiousness, suggests that love, in the end, contains all — that frustration, rage, vulnerability, loss and grief are love’s constituent parts, bound by and into it.
Delivers plenty of...trademark dream logic while also making full use of the longer form to simmer characters, relationships and setting to the point of profound tenderness ... An intriguing cast of characters who each nurse their own tangles of kinship and loss ... A refreshing celebration of the special alchemies that animate human connection of all kinds.
A 600-page behemoth of a novel that shatters reality while pulling readers into the lives of several characters and obliterating any perceived dividing line between speculative fiction and literary fiction ... Delves into the complications of love and friendship, family drama, grief, resilience, and the unlimited power of adaptability while delivering a tale of supernatural menace that also explores what it truly means to be alive ... This novel is proof that Link can be as strange, entertaining, and witty in novel form as she is when writing short stories.
The undead teens at the heart of The Book of Love are fully realized, thoughtfully detailed individuals, and a large cast of secondary and tertiary characters adds depth and variety. Ms. Link’s writing is so poetic that chunks of text sometimes require second readings just to fully enjoy her style ... I would have loved to see such expertise and meticulous care devoted to a more grown-up plotline. comes across as a very smart YA novel, with lots of sexual exploration and newly fledged college students returning home for Christmas, filled with big thoughts ... There are many beautiful moments in this engrossing book, and it’s a pleasure to see a writer of Ms. Link’s manifest talents spin out a tale at length. I look forward to the next novel—and hope she sets her sights on a story that lives up to her abilities.
At 640 pages, she takes every opportunity to add as much flavor and color to her story as possible. The result is a sprawling, at times majestic, story with a richly detailed setting, a large cast of well-rendered, endearing characters, and a plodding, ponderous approach to plot development that will test readers’ endurance ... A wild ride, and Link goes to great lengths to hold your attention as the story careens from one extreme to another. But it’s fair to say that the lesson of the book is that even the most powerful storytellers can benefit from some reining in.
A love story, yes. It’s also a ghost story, and a coming-of-age story, and a portrait of a small town. It’s about magic and music and morality. It’s about how annoying siblings are, and how much you need them. It is a book that contains many books, that is bigger than the sum of its many parts. It is also, perhaps, a book that should have been a touch smaller ... The mystery of what happened to the three teenagers provides Link with the skeleton of a plot, but she is almost palpably uninterested in solving it ... It’s hard not to think, looking at The Book of Maryanne, of a very brief and strange and beautiful short story, the kind at which Link excels ... This is a slow-moving book ... Link’s gifts are fairly extraordinary on their own. If The Book of Love is flawed, it’s also something strange and beautiful and shimmering.
The plot is not the most interesting thing here. Those attuned to the mechanics of fantasy will guess what’s coming. Link, used to the short-story form, has overstretched a good idea and the latter parts of this long novel are on the thin side ... Yet the writing sparkles with wit and colour, and there is much camp weirdness and shimmering grandeur. Thousands of moths descend on the town; statues come to life; a hotel owner becomes a tiger, and there’s even a pink flying unicorn ‘in a snit’. This is entertaining fantasy and also, in its own way, experimental. Dancing lady, unicorn, happy face.
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.
Most novels with a big fantastical element set out to make magic extraordinary, glamorous – magical. The Book of Love rejects that so entirely that sometimes it seems as though it’s having an allergic reaction ... This, of course, can be delightful, but it doesn’t always work in the book’s favor ... It’s a tricky tightrope, negotiating comic and epic in the same story, and the book wobbles at the end. Something else that never quite feels stable is the pacing. A slow pace is often necessary for world-building, but here it’s a function of the characters’ apparent lack of interest in the circumstances around their deaths – they reconnect with friends and partners as if nothing has happened. There’s a strong sense that Link is much more interested in the dynamics of teen social circles than in the plot on which those dynamics ostensibly hang ... What never wobbles is the writing itself. The prose is diamond-sharp; it’s hard to imagine Link ever writing a clunky sentence or a bad description. Her characters are all brilliantly fast-talking and fast-thinking, their conversations full of wordplay and in-jokes.
The Book of Love takes its otherworldly protagonists into situations that don’t necessarily further the plot, but do create a strong sense of groundedness within the characters and their world; This artistic decision only adds to the restlessness the undead children felt while in the void of the afterlife, tying a thread from the novel’s plot to its form ... Despite its length, in The Book of Love, Link builds a world that I wanted to keep falling further into. She reminds us that there is magic in the mundane, that the strength of our will determines our fate, and that those who journey with us are just as important as the road itself.
A deliciously rebellious take on the classic romance novel form, The Book of Love plunges into adored (and despised) tropes of the genre and guts them, often with humor, sometimes with gore, and always with, well, love—for as much as our protagonists’ future in the mortal world is entangled in the baffling affairs of immortals, that doesn’t stop them from dipping their toes in new relationships, revisiting old ones, or remembering what it’s like to be human and vulnerable ... Despite at times feeling like a wild romp through a universe where literally anything is possible with the right amount of will and magic, the reader is fed the mechanics of this world at a pace that, for the most part, does not overwhelm, and dangles enough of a sense of mystery in front of you to satiate until the end, which escalates into a thrilling whirlwind of magic and emotion.
Dazzling ... 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...without ever missing a step. This is a masterpiece.
