The Book Of Love

By Kelly Link
Fantasy/Head Of Zeus/Paperback/640 pages/$32.59/Amazon SG (amzn.to/49Eoq9s)
3 stars

Laura, Daniel and Mo from Lovesend, Massachusetts, are dead. But the three teenagers have a chance to rejoin the world of the living as Mr Anabin – their abstruse high school music teacher – and a dog-like companion Bogomil offer them a mission to change their fate.

Along with a stranger, Bowie, the trio are given an enigmatic proposition that goes unexplained for much of this lengthy, diffuse novel: “2 Return, 2 Remain.”

Instead of a mission to escape death, this young adult fantasy bildungsroman focuses on resurrection and choosing life despite the chaotic score of adolescent struggles and desires that haunt the young heroes.

The Book Of Love is MacArthur Fellow and writer Kelly Link’s highly anticipated first novel after her acclaimed short story collections, including Get In Trouble (2015), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

This tome can be read as a series of linked short stories, as each chapter is titled after a character, gradually expanding from Laura, Daniel and Mo to the world of the living and others who make up this small-town novel.

The set-up is constantly surreal as the teenagers return to their pre-death lives while realising that a few uncanny changes have happened. They have to learn to accept that their lives can no longer be fully shared with the living and their loved ones, and that a secret binds the teenagers who return from the mysterious realm.

Daniel, for example, realises a bodily error by Mr Anabin: “The ear on his head was not his ear. His missing ear was on Laura’s head. But the world? Excluding the business of ears and black rabbits and music teachers with secret powers, the world was the way it had always been. Wasn’t it?”

Mo, who is a portrait of gay loneliness, returns to learn that his grandmother – a popular romance novelist who writes books with happy endings under the pseudonym Caitlynn Hightower – is dead, and has to grapple with grief.

When he confides in his friend Vincent, with whom he experiences a fraught physical and emotional intimacy, he is not understood: “I’m sad. I’m just sad. Because I died.”

None of their friends and family members realise that they are dead, thinking they had studied abroad in Ireland all this time.

On the one hand, these are charming vignettes of adolescent life and foibles as the characters struggle with sexuality, rivalries with siblings and friends, as well as personal identity.

On the other, The Book Of Love is a sprawling narrative that crawls along. It begins to strain under its dream logic after a while, and it is difficult to grasp the stakes of its withheld mystery until a lot later in the novel.

The rotating cast of characters intrigues for a bit, but starts to feel more centrifugal than propulsive as the narrative plods on. The novel is a charming if choppy examination of the teenage world that works better in parts than as a whole.

If you like this, read: Get In Trouble by Kelly Link (Random House, 2016, $26.47, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3TbGpyU). A Pulitzer Prize finalist, the collection of short stories contains a touch of fantasy and horror, including a high school student’s relationship with a limited-edition ghost boyfriend and space astronauts telling ghost stories at a party.