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  • The Book of Love

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Kelly Link
  • Narrated by: January LaVoy
  • Length: 23 hrs and 31 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (1 rating)

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The Book of Love cover art

The Book of Love

Written by: Kelly Link
Narrated by: January LaVoy
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Publisher's Summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In the long-awaited first novel from short story virtuoso and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link, three teenagers become pawns in a supernatural power struggle.

“A dreamlike, profoundly beautiful novel [that] pushes our understanding of what a fantasy novel can be.”—Amal El-Mohtar, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“Imagine a ring of David Mitchell and Stephen King books dancing around a fire until something new, brave, and wonderful rose up from the flames.”—Isaac Fitzgerald, Today (Spring Pick!)

The Book of Love showcases Kelly Link at the height of her powers, channeling potent magic and attuned to all varieties of love—from friendship to romance to abiding family ties—with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary derring-do. Listeners will find joy (and a little terror) and an affirmation that love goes on, even when we cannot.

Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are.

With them in the room is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of the bargain their music teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.

Welcome to Kelly Link’s incomparable Lovesend, where you’ll encounter love and loss, laughter and dread, magic and karaoke, and some really good pizza.

©2024 Kelly Link (P)2024 Random House Audio

What the critics say

The Book of Love is an incredible achievement—a novel whose people and places feel so true to life that the magic that shimmers through the pages like grown-up fairy dust seems not just real but unquestionable.”—Cassandra Clare, author of Sword Catcher

“By turns playful and harrowing, surreal and sagacious, replete with gods and other monsters, The Book of Love is an astonishing, gorgeous novel written with Link’s unique wit, warmth and ability to get under your skin.”—Holly Black, author of Book of Night

“A supernatural story about love in all its guises bewitches. . . . The places of this novel are both glitteringly strange and so fully realized that one feels one might visit them tomorrow.”—San Francisco Chronicle

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He said she said messed with the dialogue

Not a bad book, probably easier to read than listen to though because of the dialogue being hijacked with “he said she said” — Laura said, Daniel said, Susannah said, and so on, instead of letting the excellent narrator just say the dialogue lines in character. I understand when there are many characters in a scene having to identify who is talking but it was a bad directing decision to constantly interrupt the flow of narration with he said she said peppered at the end of each line of dialogue. Besides that, the plot hung together in a decenyly woven short story chapter style. It was amusing to hear the author’s sidebar jabs at the publishing industry throughout. I wonder what her publisher thought of that?

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