This is a very nice book, and unfortunately, I'm not using that as a form of praise. It's a little too nice. If I laid out all the things that happen in this book, it would sound like it's rife with trauma and difficulty and life, but the truth is that the reader is allowed/encouraged to keep such a distance from the pain that it's all just very...nice.
As such, reading this book was vaguely pleasant, but leaves me with nothing much to grasp on to. And, while I don't need every book to be doom and gloom, having lived with grief myself, I do kind of resent this genteel handling of multiple bereavements that never come close enough to the reader to have any effect on them.
I need to take a step back to talk about the book as a whole, and why, although it's pleasant, I'm not sure it's particularly good. It takes place in a small bookstore on an island, which does seem like the sort of book that would be up my alley. The book is framed with a recommendations of short stories at the start of each chapter, from the main character to someone we don't know as the book begins.
A.J. Fikry is a widow in his thirties. His wife died, and he is sunk in grief, but it's not the kind of grief that invites the reader in to share it. A priceless book he owns is stolen. A two-year-old is left on the floor of the shop and her mother is found drowned by her own volition. A.J. adopts Maya. The death of her mother is at a remove.
There is a representative from a publishing company who comes out to the island, and they flirt, and fall in love from a distance, and eventually get together, and this section is possibly my favourite, because it is sweet, and it's not sweetness at the cost of glossing over pain. (Let me say the book thinks the characters are in pain, and says so, but doesn't show so, and none of the pain seems to have much of a long-term effect on anyone.)
There are affairs of surrounding characters. Another death. But it's very sweet through all of that. And then, and here is the major spoiler, A.J. is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Now, let me make this perfectly clear. I lost my father to cancer seven years ago. I lost my mother to a stroke just over a year ago. I have grieved and am grieving, and will continue to grieve. It is a part of who I am, and just because I am functional in this world does not mean that I do not carry that with me, all the time.
Because I lost both my parents before I turned 40, I am particularly vulnerable to books in which parents die. Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life has wrecked me both times I've read it. It's not hard to touch me emotionally with that particular plot point. So here's the thing - A.J.'s impending and actual death touched me not at all. At any moment. It felt, as the whole book had, rather sweet, but not real, or raw, or like it was happening to a real person or would affect real people.
Again, I don't need ugly, but this book feels like it thinks pain is best ignored and happiness foregrounded. I guess I'd rather read books where happiness is hard-won and pain is real, and both exist at the same time. If what you want is slight comforting fiction, you could do worse. But if you want anything that takes a risk, lets in an emotion, or explores something deeply, this isn't the book for you.
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