A.J. Fikry is a widower with a bookstore and an increasingly serious drinking problem. (He’s not an alcoholic, he says, he just drinks to the point of passing out at least once a week.) The one bright spot: he has Tamerlane, a rare volume from Edgar Allen Poe that could fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars once the economy shapes up a little. Then it’s stolen, and a two-year old appears in his store with a note asking him to take care of her. Well…crap.

Last year I checked out one of Ms Zevin’s titles but never got around to reading it, something I intend to repair immediately: I have no idea how she packed so much growth into such a little novel, growth whose substance I didn’t appreciate fully until I watched the movie version of this (immediately after finishing the book) and seeing how rushed the characters were by comparison. The A.J. who opens this book is a deeply troubled fellow who is absolutely hilarious to read, but who would be a pill to know in real life. There is something in him, though, that flowers when a child is introduced to his life –for what he thinks is a weekend, but which will become a lifetime. His soul is dislodged from its rut of depressed snarking and drinking and, forced to expand itself to include another person, and set free to flourish. He becomes a father, yes, but the leads to further growth, to friends, to changes in the bookstore that allow it and his community to flourish – and so, more impressively, we get the growth of other characters, and of the town itself. A man who appears very minor will be one of the main supporting characters by book’s end, and then of course there’s Maya. Parents would judge this better, of course — that particular door has never opened to me — but Maya begins this novel as a two year old and is a teenager at its end, and she grew physically and emotionally in a very plausible fashion. I can’t imagine that’s easy to pull off. And, of course, there’s the fact that this is a book about books and writers, with one especially delicious minor twist. Wonderful read!

Highlights:

“Yes,” said the cop. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
“People like to say that,” A.J. replies. “But it was someone’s fault. It was hers. What a stupid thing for her to do. What a stupid melodramatic thing for her to do. What a goddamn Danielle Steel move, Nic! If this were a novel, I’d stop reading right now. I’d throw it across the room.”
The cop (who was not much of a reader aside from the occasional Jeffery Deaver mass-market paperback while on vacation) tried to steer the conversation back to reality. “That’s right. You own the bookstore.”

“My wife and I,” A.J. replied without thinking. “Oh Christ, I just did that stupid thing where the character forgets that the spouse has died and he accidentally uses ‘we.’ That’s such a cliché. Officer”—he paused to read the cop’s badge—“Lambiase, you and I are characters in a bad novel. Do you know that? How the heck did we end up here?

“If this were a short story, you and I would be done by now. A small ironic turn and out. That’s why there’s nothing more elegant in the prose universe than a short story, Officer Lambiase. If this were Raymond Carver, you’d offer me some meager comfort and
darkness would set in and all this would be over. But this . . . is feeling more like a novel to me after all. Emotionally, I mean. It will take me a while to get through it. Do you know?

“I’m sorry about before when I referred to you as an ‘unimportant supporting character.’ That was rude and for all we know, I am the ‘unimportant supporting character’ in the grander saga of Officer Lambiase. A cop is a more likely protagonist than a bookseller. You, sir, are a genre.”

“Let’s get married,” he says with an almost pained expression. “I know I’m stuck on this island, that I’m poor, a single father, and in a business with somewhat diminishing returns. I know that your mother hates me, that I’m quite obviously crap when it comes to hosting author events.”
“This is an odd proposal,” she says.

“It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.”

How to account for its presence when I know it is only average? The answer is this: Your dad relates to the characters. It has meaning to me. And the longer I do this (bookselling, yes, of course, but also living if that isn’t too awfully sentimental), the more I believe that this is what the point of it all is. To connect, my dear little nerd. Only connect.