The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

I recently finished reading The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. It was a pleasant read – low stress, low risk, low drama and a well-told story. Zevin is best known as a writer of ‘Young Adult’ books and this is, I believe, her first aimed at adults.

The book is about a middle-aged man who owns a bookstore on Alice Island off the coast of New England. Fikry’s wife had died two years earlier and he is depressed, lonely and so much of a literary snob that his bookstore is slowly failing. He only stocks titles that meet is demanding 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 find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. 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.

In the first few chapters, his prize possession, a first edition of Poe’s ‘Tamerlane’ is stolen and he is about to give things up when a surprise package appears in the children’s section of his store. A little bundle of joy named ‘Maya’ appears. At first he plans to give her up to foster care but he falls in love with her and adopts her. At about the same time, he becomes interested in a publisher’s representative, a young woman who visits his store twice a hear to sell books.

I imagine you can see where this is going and so can everyone else. There are some exciting events, a few problems that Zevin quickly solves up and, at the end, everything is tied up in a neat bow.

There area a couple of gimmicks – at the beginning of each chapter there is a brief note to Maya in the form of what appear to be shelf talkers and expressing a love for books and for reading.

Zevin has written an entertaining novel that doesn’t pretend to be much more. There is a lot of love for books and literature expressed in the novel and it’s an easy and pleasant read. I think you might like it.