This storied life is about love, loss of love, love found again and love of books. Fikry is a bookstore owner (motto “No man is an island; every book is a world”) on the island of Alice. His adored wife has been killed in an automobile accident and his life has become not the one he had imagined. He is drinking and horrible to his customers and his sales reps, especially Amelia, the slightly eccentric woman from Knightly Press. We are treated to his welcome to her thus:
“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 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.”
He has found a collectible early book of Poe’s poetry and he plans to sell it and the store and escape from Alice. But the book is stolen which brings him into contact with the Chief of Police, Lambiase who sympathetic to A. J. but not a reader, yet. Then we need to stretch our imaginations when the plot delivers a baby abandoned in the bookstore. Fikry’s life changes!
The ending isn’t happily ever after, but not depressing either. Along the way we get Fikry’s take on books which is fun and the evolving of book reading groups, the most successful being Lambiase running the Chief’s Choice Book Club.
I would classify this book is an adult YA. Zevin has written for YA as well as adult.