Publishers Weekly
★ 12/18/2023
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. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
The Book of Love is an incredible achievement—a novel whose people and places feel so true to life that the magic that shimmers through the pages like grown-up fairy dust seems not just real but unquestionable.”—Cassandra Clare, author of Sword Catcher
“By turns playful and harrowing, surreal and sagacious, replete with gods and other monsters, The Book of Love is an astonishing, gorgeous novel written with Link’s unique wit, warmth and ability to get under your skin.”—Holly Black, author of Book of Night
“A supernatural story about love in all its guises bewitches. . . . The places of this novel are both glitteringly strange and so fully realized that one feels one might visit them tomorrow.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“The Book of Love does justice to its name. 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.”—The New York Times Book Review
“[Link's]. . . . writing sparkles with wit and colour, and there is much camp weirdness and shimmering grandeur.”—The Spectator (UK)
“The wonders of Hollywood special effects feel like garish imitations next to Link’s sorcery.”—The Washington Post
“. . . if you are, possibly, a cynic looking for something to give you some renewed faith in love/friendship/literature in this month of cold and candy hearts, and/or find yourself wishing for a little more magic in your life, this is the novel for you. It’s even red.”—Lit Hub
“A dizzying dream ride you will never forget.”—Leigh Bardugo, author of Ninth House
“Haunting, immersive, and at times surpassingly beautiful.”—Locus
“This is one of those books that cuts your life in two: before you read it, and after.”—Alix E. Harrow, author of Starling House
“A giant, glorious novel about friendship, love, queerness, rock-and-roll, stardom, parenthood, loyalty, lust and duty.”—Cory Doctorow, author of The Lost Cause
“The Book of Love is a luxurious, bewitching novel of exceptional beauty and power.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
“Pure enchantment—a tale of love, death, magic and teenagers being teenagers, rich with fairy strangeness and told in sentences like jewels strung on a chain.”—Zen Cho, author of Black Water Sister
“Pulitzer finalist Link makes a dazzling full-length debut that proves her gloriously idiosyncratic style shines just as brightly at scale. . . . This is a masterpiece.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A moving and deft exploration of the many ways ‘love goes on even when we cannot.’”—Booklist (starred review)
“An absolute feast of a story, ushering the reader along a path that is always sublime, often hilarious, and at every single point rammed full of heart and truth.”—Melinda Salisbury, author of Her Dark Wings
Library Journal
12/01/2023
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
MARCH 2024 - AudioFile
January LaVoy performs this epic story of three teenagers who are brought back from the dead just long enough to compete in a mysterious game to see who gets to continue to live. In this debut novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link, characters Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves back in Lovesend, Massachusetts, one year after they died. Their families have no memory of what happened. LaVoy's narration evokes the dreamlike quality of the novel as two supernatural entities compete against each other, using the teenagers' lives for their own ends. LaVoy captures whimsy and darkness in equal measure, spinning this fairytale-like story into an engrossing audiobook. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-11-04
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.