The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Recently, I read Gabrielle Zevin’s novel The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. The story of Zevin’s book was similar to that of A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman. Many websites that review the two books compare them to one another. Both stories revolve around a lonely, older man who finds a new meaning to life. I read A Man Called Ove last summer on vacation and absolutely loved it. So I knew that if AJ’s story was anything like Ove’s, I was going to love it.

I was wrong. Sort of.

Certain parts of the book were enjoyable. The ending is especially well written and heartbreaking to read, which I love. The book’s beginning isn’t as strong.

AJ Fikry owns a small bookstore on Alice Island, a fictional island near Massachusetts. His store is cleverly titled Island Books, and the story opens with AJ being extremely rude to a sales representative for a publishing company. AJ was immediately rude and annoying, and I did not want to spend 250 pages with him. After this, AJ’s store is somehow robbed and a valuable book that he conveniently left sitting around is stolen. And a stranger suddenly leaves her two year old daughter in AJ’s store, requesting for him to care for the child, before drowning herself.

My main issue with the first few chapters of the book is that there wasn’t much set up for major plot points or rationale for character’s decisions. This also makes it difficult to discern traits of the characters because the author introduces them one way, and then has them act in the complete opposite way with little to no reasoning. For example, AJ is introduced to the readers as an angry old man who hates everything except literary fiction and then out of nowhere he decides to adopt a child, even after repeatedly stating that he doesn't want to adopt her, and he isn’t in a good enough place financially or mentally to adopt her.

All of this plot and character development is wrapped in chapters of confusing time skips and speedy pacing. There’s time skips, but they weren’t quite made clear enough, at least to me. They came out of nowhere and there was no indication that a significant amount of time was passing. And due to these time skips, I as a reader didn’t have time to understand the characters or their decisions. So it felt like things were happening way too fast. And they sort of were, in a way.

Aside from the pacing of the first half of the book, and the questionable opening, there was not much that I didn’t like in the middle and end. Characters began to act more according to their previously established traits, and the pacing became more consistent. I, personally, grew to really love the character of AJ’s daughter. And I did end up crying over the ending.

Overall, it wasn’t my favorite book, and still isn’t. I wouldn’t recommend it as something to buy and read as soon as possible. But some of it was good and if the plot sounds interesting I’d consider seeing if your library or a nearby used bookstore has it.