A recommendation from Britt! Via Book Group’s year-end book swap, where amusingly enough I didn’t actually pick this up (and no one picked up The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain would you believe???)
Okay like, is this schmaltz? Yes. Is this very pat and full of plot threads so neatly tied up you’d roll your eyes if someone insisted it’s a true story? Yes. Does this have a bit of a twist that isn’t foreshadowed on the jacket and might entirely throw you out of your enjoyment? Yes(?) Was it an enjoyable book and the exact right book to read during the crisp cozy winter months? Well, yes, hence the rating.
In all honesty I wasn’t the hugest fan of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I know! I know, everyone loved it. You didn’t need to be a fan of video games to love it, everyone said! I do disagree. You need to feel in your gut that video games are an immersive world that breathes and lives (as opposed to saying so intellectually the way I do). But then I will admit the reverse. To enjoy this book, you do need to think that books are the most wonderful, magical items on this planet, capable of life changing revelations. The theft of a book of immense value needs to be devastating not because of the money but because of the loss of the book. A bookshop on a rather remote island needs to be the absolute best way you can think to use your fancy Ivy League college degrees, as opposed to a losing proposition (especially since, if I have my timeline vague correct, said bookshop was started in the heyday of Amazon-as-Goliath, not the older days of Shop-Around-The-Corner as Queen or the modern days of B&N-as-David) (which, separately, what??).
A.J. (who is actually called Ajay, and you know what, this is more than a parenthetical point) is our main character. That’s short for Ajay, again, because he is half Indian (through his father’s side, I think, which brings to question the last name? Why not make his mother Indian?) and so I’m confused as to why the book title is A.J. And I think the answer is, of course, because otherwise this would have been shelved as Ethnic Fiction, despite the fact that Gabrielle Zevin isn’t Indian herself (double checked, she is a mix of many different ethnicities, but none of South Asian persuasion, and her partner doesn’t seem to be either). I could probably look more deeply into this, but it’s a bit of a bummer which overshadowed the usual little ding! of inclusion I get when a character in a novel not explicitly marketed as such has South Asian rep.
So to go back, A.J. is our main character, the book starts out with him in pretty dire straits (he is widowed and a once-weekly-alcoholic, and he’s just lost a pretty valuable (in the book noted as $400,0000ish) copy of Edgar Allen Poe’s poems, and so everything seem pretty down. He’s also in charge of a bookshop on the small island that he lives on, confusingly, one of those stores that seems to be holding on by virtue of the rent being low (it turns out later that he and his late wife bought the building flat out, in a convenient plot twist that belies a point that book-ing is a pursuit for the independently wealthy). In a mild spoiler, the same habit of leaving his door unlocked which loses him the book (so we think) has also gained him a small baby, who is left on the floor of said shop. An attempt to return said child goes poorly, as you might guess, and through the ministrations of the town and the child and the seemly and erudite rep for a publishing company who visits thrice a year Ove A.J. learns to live and love again.
If that all sounds like a diabetic coma waiting to happen, know that there are moments throughout where I literally laughed out loud (including an interlude with topiaries in January seen over a fence) and all in all this is a short read with a number of satisfying plot lines. Perhaps you will pick up the Grand Twist faster than I did–it’s not particularly subtly foreshadowed–but even if you don’t it doesn’t feel unearnt, and the consequences are reasonable. Definitely going on the list of fiction, non-vacuous, non-misery that I keep updating every time someone asks for it.