Week Seven: The Book of Love
JULY 24, 2024 • CAMP TOB WEEK SEVEN
The Book of Love
first half discussion
We’ve just rounded the halfway mark at Camp ToB 2024—this week we’re starting the fourth of our six summer reads.
Continuing our midsummer vibe of “magic is all around us,” we’ll be discussing the first half of The Book of Love by Kelly Link, and here to take us through the book is the Commentariat’s C Pruett (she/her)!
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Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom one year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Mass., having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are. In the room with them is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of a bargain their teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.
This has been excerpted from the publisher’s summary and edited for length.
Hello, and welcome to Camp ToB! Can you tell us where you’re writing from and how long you’ve followed the Tournament of Books?
I’m in Richmond, Va., and the first year I dived into the comments section was 2015, and I’ve been more or less active every year since. I’ve also gone back and read a lot of the judgments from past years, sort of like those betting parlors where you can follow old horse races on video.
Hahha, and yeah we need to start bringing those over to the new site, now that you mention it. Can you tell us about what you like to read?
I like a lot of books on the edge of genre—mysteries that function character explorations and travelogues, fantastic stories that live at the edge of the real world, crime capers that are also tragic love stories. The two authors I never skip are Tana French and David Mitchell, but I also recently binged The Wheel of Time and The Expanse on audiobook in less than a year, and I love a great comic book.
Excellent—thank you for sharing! And now let’s head into your questions for this week’s discussion, up through page 282 of the book.
1.
Early in The Book of Love, Susannah muses, “There are so many novels about falling in love and so few about finding a really good and rewarding job.” Later, Mo remembers his grandmother, the romance novelist, telling him that “lucky people found the work they were meant to do. Unlucky people found love.” The first half of this novel has a lot of examples of work (work as in labor, work as in art) and love (love as in desire, love as in affection). How does the book explore the tension between these concepts, and how do you think they might resolve as the narrative goes on?
2.
Like many stories across different media, The Book of Love takes characters from a world that is more or less like ours and confronts them with the idea that “magic is real.” What did you learn about each character from their reactions to the revelation? Did any character’s response particularly resonate with you? If you’re familiar with other stories in this genre, does Link’s novel seem to be in conversation with any particular tropes or texts?
3.
Without quoting Debussy, John Cage, or Kesha Rose Sebert, what is music?
3a.
OK, OK. Maybe that shouldn’t be the question itself, but the characters within the novel debate over the definition of music. What does this contested definition do for the book?
3b.
Have you ever been in a band, or did you ever want to be? Does reading about these kids’ band make the idea more or less appealing?
4.
What do you think of the structure and pacing of the novel? Are you swimming in the richness of detail and description and the depth of the characters’ psychology? Are you thinking a lot more plot should have happened within 282 pages? Does it depend, and if so, on what?