The Storied Life of AJ Fickry

by Gabrielle Zevin

Viking     2014

272 pages   Fiction

Do you have definitive tastes in books that you read? Bookseller AJ Fickry certainly does. Here are his tastes: “I do not like postmodernism, post­apocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be — basically gimmicks of any kind. . . . I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and — I imagine this goes without saying — vampires.”

AJ Fickry owns a bookstore on the small (fictitious) tourist Alice Island along with his wife Nic, who was raised on the island. As the book opens, Nic has been killed in a car accident and AJ is drinking himself to death. One day he finds a toddler, Maya, in the children's book department at the store, and Maya changes his life forever. He becomes a parent. And it is in that moment that this becomes a novel worth reading. AJ becomes charming! Oh—and he meets Amelia, a book rep.

The book is not just as straightforward as that, and yet it is. This is a very simple story about life—and what happens when you were planning something else. One of the lovely things about the novel is that it involves very few characters—and all these characters are extremely well developed. The most revealing part of AJ Fickry's character are the little book blurbs that are attached to the beginnings of the chapters. The books he references are the foreshadowing of what is going to happen in each chapter. It was a delightful touch and kind of a little joke for bookies.

There is an aspect of gimmick in the novel that was pointed out to us by the English teacher in our book club meeting last night. And yet as I thought about it, gimmick may be part of the charm of the book, particularly because AJ Fickry hates gimmicks of any kind. Basically, he would hate The Storied Life... This, I think, is one of Zevin's inside jokes. She added the gimmicks purposefully to let us know how AJ would feel about the book she had written about him.

We had our book club meeting in a book store that was very much like the book store on Alice Island. Kazoo Books sits in a little neighborhood in Kalamazoo. It is filled with new and used books and is owned by a very gracious couple who let us drink wine and stay until long after the store closed. A fireplace in the corner made us feel cozy and warm, just like the book. The setting of The Storied Life... is the most important aspect of the novel, and the setting was the best part of our book club meeting.

Reading The Storied Life of AJ Fickry was the most comforting thing that could have happened following a week of feeling totally lost and out of sorts after the election. The Washington Post reviewer explains this sensation: "Everything is explained, and all the loose ends are tied up with a bow. A few genuinely grim moments (death appears frequently and suddenly) are leavened by the animating spirit behind the whole, a light tone marked by earnestness, a straightforward approach to love and joy, and a felicitous charm."

Many of Gabrielle Zevin's books are for young adults, and The Storied Life of AJ Fickry has that feel about it. Teenagers would enjoy it as much as their parents.

Gabrielle Zevin's website.

The Book that Matters Most

by Ann Hood

W. W. Norton     2016

368 pages     Fiction

A book club! Most of us who read book reviews or are on Goodreads belong to a book club. Ava, a university French professor in Providence RI, had been wanting to be in a book club for several years. But when a place opens up in the library book club run by her friend Cate, the librarian, she is ill prepared to join. Her husband has just left her for a younger woman and her children are far away. However, she knows that contact with others and intellectual stimulation will be valuable for her mental health, so she accepts the invitation and meets the group. "All these faces, looking open and ready for something, she needed most of all, the comfort of people who wanted nothing more than to sit together and talk about books."

 The group's theme for the year is "The Book that Matters Most", and each club member needs to choose a book that the entire group will read for discussion—one book a month. Most members of the group choose books from the American school reading lexicon—Catcher in the Rye; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Pride and Prejudice; To Kill a Mockingbird; One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Great Gatsby among others. Ava chooses From Clare to Here by Rosalind Arden, an obscure New England author. Ava has her own reasons for choosing that particular book, and therein lies the plot of The Book that Matters Most.

I had never read anything by Ann Hood, although she has several books in her lexicon, and she is well-reviewed.  I appreciated the book's theme, structure, and character development, particularly that of Ava and her daughter Maggie. I loved that Ava didn't read Pride and Prejudice and instead watched the movie. I have to admit that there have been books that I didn't read for our book club, like Wolf Hall and Madame Bovary. (Actually nobody in the club read Madame Bovary!) 

Ava is a woman struggling to regain her footing following her divorce, and when we are privy to the other baggage that she is carrying, we are very understanding of her reticence to participate fully in the book group. Maggie, the other main character, is also deeply flawed, but at the same time deeply appealing. She is ostensibly on a study abroad in Florence, but has gone to Paris without her parents' knowledge and has gotten herself into a scary situation with an older Frenchman. Drug and alcohol addled, she is struggling to come to the surface and really begin her life. The reader longs for her to come to her senses.

As the book club explores the reasons why each month's book was important to the member who chose it, we see that books have the power to aid in the recovery from all the various types of loss. Each book club member has his or her own story.  I was intrigued by the concept of The Book that Matters Most and raced through the book. I spent a lot of time pondering which books mattered most to me, and why most people pick books that they read as young adults. Perhaps that is when they are the most vulnerable. 

While the character development is strong, the plot suffers from the author's desire to move the story line to resolution using very obvious plot devices.  A couple of times I said "Oh, for heaven's sake!" out loud, the plot twist was so obvious. The surprising thing to me was that I didn't need a "happy" ending for the book to be fully developed. Apparently that was the author's need, not mine.

I have written this book blog for six years—it has been an exercise for me—more like a diary than a review tool. I have explored more than 400 books with the purpose of finding what matters to me in each book I read. In those six years, some books have stayed with me longer than others—some I have no recollection of at all. Some books mattered a great deal; sometimes one little detail was what mattered; sometimes the author's intent was the most important thing.  When reading The Book that Matters Most, all of my mental effort went into thinking about why we read, why books matter, and why some books become so important to us. If that was the author's intent, then she succeeded. If her intent was to create an illuminating plot, she didn't succeed quite so well.