The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin. Kindle.

Charming, entertaining, heartfelt.

I’m a sucker for books about books, and even more so for books about bookstores, so naturally I was excited to read this novel. This was a quick read spanning several defining years of protagonist A.J. Fikry’s life, with the charming, sometimes scandalous storylines of his supporting characters woven throughout.

As the widowed and cynical owner of a bookstore on rural (and fictional) Alice Island, Fikry has surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) unyielding opinions about literature and the art of reading in general. Fikry’s rigidity seeps into his non-literary life as well following the sudden death of his charismatic wife, and Fikry is perfectly content with allowing it—and cheap red wine— to consume him completely. That is, until an unexpected expansion of his family leads to his metamorphosis from crotchety 39-year-old hermit to father and bonafide community member.

Experiencing Fikry’s transformation was moving and entertaining, but the passage of time felt hurried at some points, and the development of the novel’s secondary characters could have used more work. Still, I loved the steady stream of literary references and the realistic portrait of life as a bookstore owner in the age of the Internet.

Favorite Quotation (one of Fikry’s many rules): “Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying.”