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

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is one of those books I should have absolutely loved.  After all, it is set mainly inside a bookstore and it features a crotchety bookseller, a dedicated publisher’s rep, and a precocious little girl who just oozes cuteness from every pore of her body.  The problem is that I only liked the book and never really came very close to loving it the way I fully expected to going in.

Don’t get me wrong, Gabrielle Zevin has not written a bad book here; it’s just that it could have been so much better than it is.  The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, though, is only 258 rather easily read pages long and that is a big part of the problem - so few words simply do not allow Zevin the space she needs to fully develop so many important characters.  And that’s a shame because if I had known more about A.J., his adopted daughter Maya, and his wife Amy, the book’s ending may have impacted me much more deeply than it did.  Perhaps the author was shooting for the kind of fable that we all grew up on, those stories where we recognize the characters by type and that tells us everything we need to know about them in order for us to focus on and enjoy the tale itself.  That’s kind of how it worked for me, anyway.  I enjoyed the story, but except for the first few glimpses of Maya I never felt that the characters were real enough for me to invest much emotion in them.

As the story begins, A.J. is not a happy camper; his wife has died and he’s stuck on Alice Island, near Hyannis, running the failing bookstore they opened together shortly after their marriage.  A.J. is such a grump these days that publisher reps who manage to make it all the way to Alice three or four times a year never know what to expect.  He is as likely to throw them out as he is to buy something from them for sale in his bookstore.  And, although he soon regrets it, that is precisely what he does when Amy Loman of Knightley Press visits Island Books for the first time.  So A.J. the grump is probably lucky to have any customers at all anymore – and the ones that he still has are not supporting the store like they did before his wife died.  No one, however, should be tempted to hold their breath while waiting for A.J. to wise up and change his attitude about life because the now heavy-drinking A.J. is not at all interested in making that happen. But then someone decides to leave a surprise for A.J. in the bookstore one night, and his life - and all of Alice Island - will be forever changed.

Author Gabrielle Zevin

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is for those of us who are always on the lookout for novels centered around books or bookstores, preferably both (you know who you are).  The bookstores in this kind of novel are usually so perfect that we can’t help wishing they were located somewhere very near us, preferably within walking distance.  Sometimes we even find ourselves wishing we could work in just such a place – even at minimum wage, if that’s what it takes to get the job.  Island Books doesn’t disappoint in that regard.

Here are two of my favorite A.J. Fikry quotes:

            “We read to know we are not alone.  We read because we are alone.  We read and we are not alone.  We are not alone.”

And this one:

            “We are not quite novels.  We are not quite short stories.  In the end, we are collected works.”

Simple words maybe, but words that do make you think.

Book Number 3,396