This plan is derailed by three occurrences: thirty-six-year-old sales representative for Knightley Press, Amelia Loman makes her first visit to Island Books to present the publisher’s Winter List (and is treated rather shabbily by A.J.) A.J.’s escape valve, a rare and valuable edition of Tamerlane, a collection of poems by Edgar Allan Poe, is stolen and a bright two-year-old girl named Maya is left in his bookstore. Since the unfortunate accidental death of his beloved wife, his plan has been to drink himself to death and drive his business to ruin. Island Books is owned by recent widower, A.J.Fikry, an opinionated, often cranky man in his late thirties with a (self-described) porcupine heart. Alice Island, a New England summer destination requiring bus and ferry travel, boasts a main street book store. The Collected Works of A.J.Fikry (aka The Storied Life of A.J.Fikry) is the fifth stand-alone novel by American author, Gabrielle Zevin. If you believe in book hangovers, well this one definitely left me in a deep state of one. It has now become one of my all time faves. I certainly cannot stress how much I recommend this book. Most of all, the quirky references to all time favorite titles, seemingly made in jest at the start, were impeccable. Some few hundred pages to the end made for quite an eloquent read, not too long not too short, again just right. Like having just the right amount of baking ingredients for that perfect Lemon Pie. It has the perfect amount of everything you could want out of a novel.
I usually find books about book stores a bit cliche to be candid, but this one here is one for the books. I wasn't expecting to fall in love with this novel, I truly wasn't. Bookish books, lovely characters, the perfect plot, a book shop on a beautiful, lone island, and of course an aging and evolving character that is both crusty and cantankerous but which readers fall in love with anyway.
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