The Brooklyn Rail

I’m not quite sure what I was expecting when I read that Kelly Link’s first novel (after many stunningly good short story collections) would be called The Book of Love. I thought maybe a sharp, lovely, brief book about wild magic and love and life. While this is a sharp and lovely book about all those things, it’s also a terrifying contemplation on grief and loss and death and power. If you don’t know Kelly Link, she’s been a Pulitzer finalist, a MacArthur Fellow, and, as Neil Gaiman says, “puts one word after another and makes real magic with them—funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous.” The MacArthur Foundation states she pushes “the boundaries of literary fiction in works that draw [on] … fantasy, science fiction, and horror while also engaging fully with the concerns and emotional realism of contemporary life.” All of these things are true, but there are already complaints in reading-land that this novel is too long or somehow not what is wanted. Yes, it is long, but never once did I feel I was reading a six-hundred-page novel—even my sharp editorial brain found very few moments where I felt any lag. In a recent visit with a friend whose child is an avid reader of a certain age, I noticed they had a book with them—at least five inches thick—and kept it close like a beloved. So, if you think this novel is too long, perhaps it’s really for those young ones who need a book to carry around like a shield, a book where they can find themselves in the characters. And these characters shine—fully embodied in their brittle young queerness, their jealousies and insecurities, their grief and lust and sadness.

The story is told in alternating points of view in alternating chapters titled in biblical fashion: “The Book of Susannah,” “The Book of Laura,” “The Book of Mo,” and so on. At times I was frustrated by breaks in forward motion, but ultimately the structure helps create a complex narrative of people trying to survive in the midst of a deadly struggle. The book opens with Susannah Hand waking up in her sister Laura’s bed in the small New England town of Lovesend. Laura has been missing for almost a year along with Susannah’s sometimes-boyfriend Daniel and friend, Mo. Susannah rages against her missing, better-loved sister Laura, smashing an acoustic guitar—a gift from their missing father. The book is full of the missing and the dead, and the shape of grief that so many of the character’s live with gives the novel some of its heft.

In the next chapter, Laura wakes up in a music classroom with Daniel Knowe, Mohammed “Mo” Gorch, and a fourth mysterious person. Laura “up until a year ago [was] quite sure of her place in the world.” But now she is barefoot, covered in dirt, and confused. The three friends learn that the music teacher, Mr. Anabin, has brought them back from death. Mo, young, Black, orphaned, and queer, is the grandson of Caitlynn Hightower, a successful romance novelist who loves happy endings. She’s also a Black woman who’s made her mark on Lovesend, including by building statues of Black women throughout town. (Aside: there are some very well-wrought plot lines focused on race and gender and power that serve well as critiques of American whiteness.)

As the four formerly-dead stand in the music classroom, they witness a deal made between Mr. Anabin and an entity known as Bogomil: “two return, two remain” and “there will be three trials.” Anabin creates a false memory for everyone in their lives—no one will remember they were dead. Of course, life has moved on without them: Mo’s beloved grandmother is dead, and through him we experience the simple reality of loss: “Everywhere he looked, his grandmother wasn’t. And she never would be again.” Daniel’s beloved younger siblings are older, and Susannah and her mother Ruth may not remember Laura’s death, but they still feel an unnamed loss.

Each chapter reveals more about the character’s lives and introduces terrifying adversaries (including an impressively murderous goddess) but there is also the underlying theme of love in all its forms—family, friendship, lust, and the sacrifices that must be made for love. Of course, “There are many kinds of love, and not all of them are built to last” but the battle between love and power is at the core of the novel—not simply good versus evil but a more subtle focus on what each character will choose when the full truth of the deal they’ve made is revealed. Mo rages at one point, “What’s the point of magic if you can’t use it to make the world a better place?” and there are moments where Mo does try to make things better. But magic isn’t like that, and life isn’t a romance novel—you don’t often get a happy ending. As Mo’s grandmother says, “In real life … happiness is a room.… If we’re lucky we stumble through its doors every now and then.” But perhaps we can take heart in Mo’s grandmother’s final words: “Love goes on even when we cannot.” This is a heartbreaking, funny, terrifying, violent, beautiful novel about life and death, love and loss, and the magic and music at the heart of everything human.