The Book of Love: Kelly Link’s Epic First Novel is a Layered, Long Ode to Love In All Forms

Acclaimed author and 2018 MacArthur Fellow, Kelly Link is best known for her short stories. (Her Get in Trouble was a Pulitzer finalist in 2016.) But while her first full-length tome is a break from this norm, the structure, cadence, and style of her debut novel, The Book of Love, mimics the feelings that a short story collection tends to elicit: a rush when we enter a new world with fervor and satisfaction when the disparate stories come together in a shared theme, environment, or event. The Book of Love expertly jolts us into Link’s imagination, where kids come back to life, supernatural beings hold an entire town’s fate in their fingertips, and magic pulses like a current throughout each and every encounter.

Inventive in concept and form, the novel follows four teenagers after they return from the dead. Their fate–whether they go back or stay among the living—is bargained by a chilling arbiter of the afterlife and his magical foil, their high school music teacher. And as the story begins to unfold, we are left with more questions than answers. 

This sense of confusion enchants us, a willing choice on behalf of Link to express the essence of the whole book, and of life itself: the more we learn, the more we realize how much we have left to learn. Link’s The Book of Love, just like life, will only reveal to us what we need to know, when we need to know it: new characters appear quite often, established characters take on other bodies, and some characters, it turns out, aren’t even real. 

In many ways, it reminds me of one classic work of magical realism, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which follows a biblical, namely Christian, premise; Similarly, The Book of Love draws us into a crafted mythology of its own. Much like the aforementioned Russian masterpiece, 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. With so many unanswered questions, it’s easy to feel fidgety when the teenagers, whose literal souls are on the line, get distracted by a crush or simple self-interest; the main criticism of the book is how long it is. But that’s teenagers for you: self-centered, self-conscious, passionate, and enduring in their ideals. The deviations they take from the moments that would move the plot along reflect the importance of the little things in life, that life is made up of these small encounters and everything in between.  

As the title suggests, this is a novel about different kinds of love: love for books, for music, for romance, family and more. At its core, The Book of Love tells of the special bond between two sisters. As a younger sister in a duo similar to the fictional one depicted, the moments in the story that stood out to me the most were the daily grievances the sister who stayed was left yearning for, after her sister’s disappearance. The two sisters’ lives are inextricably linked, with each one a wellspring of wisdom for the other, and the lack of one sister’s presence left a gaping hole no one else could ever fill: Grief, so it seems, is love with no place to go. Link deftly describes this specific sense of loss with simple, yet feverish prose, a mechanical wonder that transcends throughout the entire novel.

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. Incandescent and impressive in its scope, Link’s first full-length novel left me aching to push the boundaries of my innate abilities, and desperate to go call my sister.

The Book of Love is available now wherever books are sold.