I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley.

I love Link's short fiction, so uncanny, and disturbing, and beautifully constructed. The same talents are on display in her debut novel, which does such a great job mixing registers, styles, genres. There's a hint of weird here, a hint of Twin Peaks, a little urban fantasy, a little young adult. There's music, and sex, and family, and growing up. Mysteries. It's really impressive, but I admit I found myself struggling with the first 1/3, when the novel was so many things but none of them fully committed yet, and the rules as uncertain to us as to the characters, disoriented.

As a result, I got stuck at the beginning, and only returned at the end of the year, to clean up my shelf. And once I hit the 1/3 mark, I rushed through the rest, more or less, but I needed to do the trust fall first.

Still highly recommended (but I wouldn't mind the next book by Link being short stories, or shorter).

This was not a book for me. I kept pushing and pushing with it. I'd pick it up, read a bit, get bored and read another book (or two) then come back to this.

I felt as though the book was trying way too hard - and I'm not sure why. What was it trying to be?

I have rounded up (a lot) to the one star that I'm giving it.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand I found the characters very real but on the other hand I struggled with plot. It is definitely a unique book and well written but maybe just wasn't for me

If I had to sum up The Book of Love by Kelly Link in one word it would be strange, but I mean that as a compliment. I am not sure that I have ever read anything quite like this before and I am not going to lie, I did contemplate giving up at one point but I am glad that I stuck with it. I loved the premise and I was also seduced by that beautiful cover but I did struggle to connect with any of the characters. At first I could not find a single redeeming feature for any of them, they were a completely unlikable bunch of teenagers even if they did have something to whine about, having died and mysteriously come back. Eventually I found myself warming to Daniel, and once I became invested in his fate I was willing to go with the flow. And what a flow there is, with malevolent god like creatures who are pitting the protagonists against one another in the continuation of a battle that began centuries ago. The writing is beautiful, precise and poetic and I cannot help but admire the author's skill.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

I’m had been looking forward to this book since Leigh Bardugo mentioned it on her tour for Hell Bent!

The first ~20% felt like a real slog for me, I was really struggling to get into it, everything felt slow, there was a lot of people to keep track of & I just struggled. But I am so glad I stuck with it, as it really paid off!

I ended up really loving this book, it was so unique? I haven’t read anything like it & I don’t think I will again!

It took me quite a while to get through it (it's pretty big!) but I think it's brilliantly paced! I actually really enjoyed it quite a lot

This romance novel is a delightful escape into the world of love, longing, and emotional connection. From the beginning, the chemistry between the main characters is palpable, drawing readers into a tender, captivating love story that unfolds with just the right balance of tension and sweetness.

The characters are well-crafted, with both protagonists feeling realistic and multi-dimensional. Each has their own set of struggles, past hurts, and insecurities, which makes their journey toward finding love both relatable and engaging. As the relationship develops, the characters grow alongside one another, learning valuable lessons about vulnerability, trust, and the power of letting go.

I found this book difficult due to the amount of shifting POVs - I felt I kept losing the thread of it. An interesting premise though.

I originally got sent an excerpt by the publisher about 6 months before the books released and was intrigued so when the full copy was put up I requested to read the whole story.

It took me a little while to get my head round how all the chapters were titled as 'The Book of <character who's p.o.v. the chapter was from>' and that the book's title follows that theme but that it was a shortening of the town's name of Lovesend. It would have made more sense to call it the book of Lovesend because as well as being the name of the town it ends up being kind of a great play on words too towards the story.

It starts off with a supernatural mystery and teen drama and quickly evolves into something more magical. It took quite a while for the actual purpose behind the teenagers resurrections to be revealed and the supernatural entitys and their purposes for being in Lovesend to finally come together and make sense, this is not a fast paced book.

It is very hard not to include spoilers but how the emotions of the characters were written is very well done and the story overall is a great idea, it is written in a sort of fairytale style with poetic writing in places.

This is a standalone story and I would absolutely not call it a romantasy like some other reviews have. There is a couple of relationships that blossom in it but it isn't ultimately what the story is actually about. I'd just call it more a magical realism story as it is set in the real world with supernatural elements.

I have the feeling I will enjoy it more the next time I read it as there were a lot of hints as to what was going on earlier on.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Kelly Link is just not the writer for me. Or I am not the reader for Kelly Link.

I appreciate the extraordinary amount of imagination in their work, but I also find it somewhat exhausting, and the prose voice leaves me a bit ambivalent.

I enjoyed a great deal of the journey of this one, but just not enough to overcome the feeling of inertia.

I loved this story. It gripped me from the very beginning and was very well written. Not my usual type of read, a little too fantasy for me, but still really enjoyed it.

Thank you to Head of Zeus and Kelly Link for gifting me an digital arc copy of The Book of Love. I was excited to read this book as it had a gorgeous cover that draw me in and loved the sound of the premise described in the blurb about three teenagers who are missing and presumed dead by the authorities and loved ones. A year later their music teacher resurrects them with magical powers to enable them to investigate how they died and return to their lives.

But sadly the promise of the premise didn’t live up to the plot in this whooper of a book – there was a lot going on in the pages and sadly the quality of the read suffered. I ended up DNFing at 45% unable to continue to finish due to the lack of plot development or interesting characters. I came to dislike the overly flowery and descriptive writing that didn’t add value to story. I felt there were too many povs to keep the writing on point and sharp. I wasn’t the right audience for this book in the end. I could only give it two stars.

Unfortunately a DNF as I found the story very disjointed and couldn’t get into the rhythm of it as it felt a bit too much all over the place.

First off...DISCLAIMER: I requested this title on NetGalley. Thanks to Head of Zeus for providing a temporary ecopy. This didn't influence my review in any way.

I CONTAIN MULTITUDES

Every book whose synopsis promises dead/undead protagonists is guaranteed to have my attention - though I don't necessarily read all of them. But The Book of Love turned out to be much more than the story of three deceased teens who come back to life. For one, it encompasses a number of genres - building on its afterlife premise, it soon turns into a mystery, a supernatural fantasy with a magical-realism feel, and a strong coming-of-age narrative, while even incorporating a tongue-in-cheek, yet fond homage to romance novels. It's both dreamy and brutal, tender and acerbic, with messy characters you can't help but love and who feel like flesh and blood even when they're...something else. It's a love letter to music and writing. It touches upon/explores all kinds to familial bonds/relationships, even the strained ones (divorced/absent parents, sibling rivalries, your friends' friends whom you don't necessarily like). It's got queer and POC rep done right (also, "trans women are women" 👍), and it addresses racism in different forms (I particularly appreciated the discourse about publishing as a Black author in the typically white romance panorama. The book is set in 2014, but I'm afraid part of that still stands). At the end of the day, if this novel does incorporate a few familiar tropes (some of them slightly Buffy-adjacent), it spins them into an imaginative story that's much bigger than the sum of its parts.

CHORUS LINE

Speaking of parts - The Book of Love is a true mosaic work of character voices, where all the components come together beautifully. We have four main points of view: gay Black teen Mo, an orphan who's come back from the dead only to deal with the loss of his grandmother and caretaker; protective older brother Daniel, living in a multi-ethnic family with four younger Black siblings; ambitious musician Laura, whose father left the family a while ago; and Laura's languid younger sister Susannah, lacking a purpose in life and more often than not at odds with her sibling. But there are tons of other perspectives in this book, some of them lasting for just a single chapter, which may alienate some readers. Personally, I found it a rewarding choice, especially given the book's page count (one might argue that TBOL wouldn't be so lengthy without all the added POVs, but even if the majority of them didn't actually forward the plot, the story would be much poorer for that).

IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT

I wish I could tell you so many more things about this book, but the spoiler risk is just around the corner. I will note that, contrary to most supernatural stories - especially the ones where the protagonists end up having to save the world, as it is the case here - The Book of Love has a strong magical-realism flavour, due to the interference of certain characters who, let's say, alter the town's perception of the events. This enhances the magical and surreal aspects of the story, yet it anchors them in reality somehow, which is definitely not the norm with supernatural narratives. Link reins in her monster book by way of compassion and humour, and frankly, the only thing I disliked is her penchant for punctuating her story with brief, but pretty straightforward (crude, even) sex scenes (I mean, I'm on board with characters having sex if needs be, and I found it realistic that 17/18-year-olds would be horny, but I don't need detailed descriptions of...things). In the end though, I was so enamored with the plot, the characters and the atmosphere that I couldn't bring myself to detract half a star because of that. I'm so glad I found this whimsical, enchanting book that surpassed my afterlife-stories-fan expectations, I plan on buying a copy for my shelves (and for reread), and I hope you won't get intimidated by its page count and give it a chance.

Laura, Daniel and Mo disappeared without trace a year ago, presumed dead by their family, friends and community. And apparently they were - but now they're not. The story follows the newly resurrected teen-agers as they try to uncover what exactly happened to them and fight for their chance to remain in the mortal world. It's a fascinating premise and really wanted to love it. Personally though, I struggled to persevere with it.

The book is undoubtedly well-written and Kelly Link is a talented, ambitious author. The prose is wonderful and the characters are so very real - these aren't airbrushed, shiny Hollywood style caricatures of teenagers. These teenagers are messy, emotionally complex and self-obsessed - but I just wanted to shake them. Hello folks, you were dead, now you're not and if you don't want to be dead again, maybe you should stop trying to shag each other in bathrooms and getting distracted by personal dramas and pointless angst so you can actually stay alive? grrrr.

Perhaps I'm just the wrong demographic or perhaps the frequent switching of viewpoints between characters prevented me from ever really being able to empathise any particular one of them, but either way I couldn't quite connect with this book. A wonderfully written and clever premise - but just not for me.

To be honest, I found this a little tricky to stick with. I'm not great with many shifting POVs, which we have here. It meant that at times I really felt I had lost the thread of it. On top of that, it was easily 300 pages longer than it needed to be. I get that the author was really trying to give context to these chararcters but entire chapters felt unnecessary to me. Some people seem to have loved it - might be a case of right book, wrong person.

I read over half of this book but really struggled to keep going due to a lack of connection with the characters and the world.

I want to write something more about this book as it was a novel I had to recheck and I enjoyed it. It's not an easy or linear story. It's part horror, part fantasy and part mystery.
It made me think of a French tv series: The Revenants. The teens are revenants, they're back from death, they're changed but they have to understand what happened and who their mysterious mate is.
It's quite weird and intriguing. I liked the storytelling and loved the story. The characters are fleshed out, alien and relatable at the same time.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Book review 📚
The book of love by Kelly Link - 2.5/3 ⭐

I saw it through, as hard as it was I made it to the end. Can I tell you I enjoyed it? No, unfortunately I can't. I spent 98% confused with what was happening, and where we were. It was incredibly hard to get into but I thought okay there's a lot happening it will all make sense at the end. It did not.

It's a shame because Link has an awesome writing style and this could of been something amazing!

Thank you to NetGalley and Head of Zeus for allowing me to read this ARC - this is an HONEST review from my own personal opinion.

I tried to get into this book but found the scene setting quite confusing - I wasn't sure if I was meant to have prior knowledge of certain aspects of it since it was not clear when something was significant or just obscure. I gave it a good go but just read it slower and slower so couldn't finish it. Perhaps I wasn't the target audience since fantasy isn't the main genre that I read!