Loganberryblog

OMG I just loved this book!

Imagine that a second girl from Kansas was swept away to OZ. But the OZ she arrives in is falling apart – literally. The color seems to have been dulled, and there is a huge hole in the middle of the land that is getting bigger.

What has happened to OZ? Short answer is Dorothy. What, you didn’t know that Dorothy went back to OZ? Well she found her way back and now it is up to Amy, the new girl from Kansas, to try to fix things.

Amy must decide which of her unlikely companions are the most trustworthy. Is it the order of the wicked witches or the wingless flying monkeys or both? Or are there other players in this game that we don’t know about yet?

I hated to put this book down and read it in just 2 days.

If you’ve ever worked in a bookstore (or wondered what kind of exotic creatures work in bookstores),  The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is a good place to start. Our title character is the depressed, widowed owner of an indie bookstore on a little island off the coast of Massachusetts. He’s let his social circle and life shrink down to almost nothing. He has only his work and his books, one rare copy of Poe in particular. Don’t let the curmudgeonly facade keep you away, however. A.J. is caustically, terribly funny. He has warmth and a touching humanity that is awakened by an unusual package that’s left at his store. Have we seen echoes of this story elsewhere? Probably. Does it matter? Not at all. Author Gabrielle Zevin has created a wonderfully structured novel around superbly real characters who like books as much as the reader. Reading may be a solitary activity, but A.J.’s life and Zevin’s book ultimately demonstrate the simple truth that literature can unite us and enrich any life, storied or not.

Wally Lamb combines complex characters and an intricate plot with an array of contemporary topics and timeless issues to produce this engrossing novel.  A wife and mother leaves her family to pursue an artistic career and an unconventional relationship.  A husband and father abruptly abandons his longtime profession as a psychologist.  Their children wonder at these transformations but hide secrets of their own.  As the plot develops and the narrative shifts among characters, secrets are revealed and motives become clear to the reader.  But even as the individual characters reach out to each other and achieve ostensible connections, secrets linger.  In the end, each remains an enigma, known only incompletely by the others.  Essentially, Lamb has addressed the longstanding question of whether anyone can really know the truth of another person, and the answer is a resounding “no.”