Review: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

This was a nice, short little book. I was wary going into this due to my recent bout of disappointing books, so my expectations were low. Maybe that was the reason I really enjoyed it. I do think that if I had allowed myself to get too excited for it, I would have been disappointed. But as it was, I consider this book a solid 3 stars. 

The story is about a man who owns a bookstore. He loses his wife and his way, and is steadily running himself and his business into the ground, when something comes along, that pulls him back to life. I can’t really describe the story more than that without giving too much away. 

The writing is lovely and the plot flows along evenly. Perhaps sometimes too evenly. I was very interested in the story in the beginning but it kind of lost me in the middle. It  managed to pull me back in though, and as mentioned I really enjoyed the story as a whole. 

Sitting here thinking about it I do feel like the characters were not sufficiently fleshed out, not even the main characters. Perhaps is has to do with the style of writing which is very detached, but even with that style it must be possible to flesh out characters a little bit more. I enjoyed the cast of characters, as it was diverse and colorful. Now and again we would get to a characters back story in what I felt was a random place, only for it to turn out to be important for the plot at that very moment. That felt a little construed to me. Could these characters not have been explored earlier on? 

The book is written with a recommendation of literature from A.J. as the preface to each chapter. I enjoyed this, even though I was a little confused at first. You quickly find out what is happening though, and you wonder why he is writing these recommendations. You quickly find out however, and then I must say that I felt some of them were a bit too revealing of the plot in the following chapter. 

In the end I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t thrilled about it. I gave it 3 stars out of 5 on Goodreads.