Gabrielle Zevin - The Storied Life of A. J. Ficry

I had never heard of this book, or of Gabrielle Zevin, until I read the glowing review on one of my favourite book blogs, Love, Laughter and a Touch of Insanity. I was looking for something light and short to read in between more substantial books and this looked like it would do the trick.

I have just now finished reading it and wanted to sit down and write a review before the magic wore off. Because this truly is a little treasure of a book. One that I will read again, and which I will keep on my book shelf and take down from time to time like an old friend.

Zevin succeeds in creating a wonderful world of people who come to matter greatly to the reader, whose fates we care about and whose legacies we will remember.

A. J. Ficry owns a bookstore on Alice Island. As the book opens, he is a widow slowly drinking himself to death and sinking his business to the ground. Through a bizarre turn of events, a baby is left in his bookstore, and his decaying heart blooms as he grapples with the basics of childcare ("She's a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times."). A. J. adopts Maya, and the love he feels for his daughter restores him. After reading a book left for him by a quirky publisher's agent named Amelia, he finds his thoughts returning to her messy blonde hair and gauche galoshes, and realises that life may yet hold more in stock for him than he had anticipated.

The quiet world of Island Books is quaint and intellectual and peaceful. Although the characters here do not lead big lives, they are lives filled with love and joy, the point being that this is the essence of a good life. Ownership, materiality, employment - none of this matters, as long as one is blessed with love.

Zevin gets the pacing of the story just right, and peppers the narrative with literary references that will please any bibliophile. Each chapter begins with a note from A. J. to his daughter, a reading recommendation, and through this brief correspondence the reader is able to guess at what twists and turns lie ahead for A. J. Although this epistolary device could have come across as contrived, Zevin's deft hand prevents it from interrupting the story in a problematic way. The writing is soft and unobtrusive, and, at times, surprisingly humorous - for example, when A. J. tells his friend, Chief of Police Lambiase, that "Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no chance but to say you liked it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life." Or when, upon going for a run, A. J. notes that "There are many challenges to long-distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put one's house keys." Or when A.J.'s mother gives Maya an e-reader and he says: "I would rather you have bought my daughter something less destructive like a crack pipe."

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5. I really enjoyed this book, and it will stay with me. A crowd-pleaser. If you love books and bookstores, this is a must-read.

Favourite passages: "A. J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it's love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother."

"We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone."

"We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on."