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. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1000 Places to See Before You Die 20 - Acropolis, Athens, Greece

Image
You cannot go to Athens and not go to the Acropolis. It is a staple on any sightseeing tour and is likely to be crawling with tourists at any given point in time. Still, it is definitely worth it to brave the masses and see the fortified citadel above the city of Athens for yourself.   The word acropolis means the highest point of the city, and there are a number of these acropoleis scattered throughout Greece, but the one in Athens is so well known that it is simply called “The Acropolis”.  There is evidence that the area on the rocky outcropping overlooking the city was inhabited already in the 4th millennium BC, but it was Pericles who started construction on the many famous buildings in the 5th century BC. These famous buildings include the Parthenon, probably the most iconic of the buildings, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike. These buildings were all seriously damaged in 1687 AD when the Venetians had sieged the city and used th
Read more

Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Image
This is the first book in a series, but I have no intention of continuing on with this series. The plot evolves around two young people, Amy and Elder. They live on a spaceship that has left Earth to find a new planet to populate. Amy was part of the cryogeniccaly frozen people on board, meant to be woken up upon arrival and using their skill set to populate the new planet. Elder, meanwhile, is part of the population that has been keeping the ship running whilst it travels towards its destination.  One day Amy is woken up from her frozen sleep and now she must learn to live on this spaceship, without her parents, slowly learning the culture and the secrets of this ship. It turns out there is an abundance of mysteries on board this ship, like who is waking up (and killing) the frozen people, who is the mysterious deceased Elder, what is the current Eldest up to and what’s with the “crazy” people and their medication.  Eventually all these mysteries are solved, but is
Read more

Reading the classics: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The book The book first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, and the year after it was released as a book in a revised edition. As I am working on this post, I discover that the book is not necessarily considered a classic….great choice for the kick-off post for the series then! However, in my experience, it does usually appear on “classics” lists, so I am going to count it! At the time of the first publication in 1890 it was considered immoral, by a lot of people, but Wilde took offense to that and defended his story. When it was published in book form though, he had changed some things and added a preface, that stated that books cannot be moral or immoral, only well written or badly written.  The author Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was Wilde’s full name, but he later changed it to Oscar Wilde because, as he said, the name was too long for someone who was going to be famous. He was born on October 16th 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. He went to Trinity Co
Read more