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There is Something Heroic about Being a Bookseller—The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

June 30, 2018 by Robin Chan

“Hey A.J.,”she calls. “There is something kind of heroic about being a bookseller.”

When we first meet A.J Fikry, the recently widowed owner of the only bookshop on Alice Island, there seems nothing particularly heroic about him. He’s an irritable drunk who thinks he and his bookshop are probably too good for the island dwellers and the seasonal tourists—he’s pretty much your typical literary snob.

But then things become interesting. A baby girl was left on his shop’s doorstep—the helpless mother wants her daughter to grow up with books. The same night, a manuscript that is literally the grumpy bookseller’s own pension goes missing. And so the bookshop has to stay in business, and the owner gets a new daughter to care for.

I used to think there is no easier task to capture book lovers’ hearts with a quirky, well-read, good-willed yet grumpy bookseller, but only in retrospect do I realize how difficult it is to pull it off without an engaging and flowing plot, a whole cast of interesting and relatable characters, and fitting them altogether in a deceptively effortless way. Gabrielle Zevin manages to achieve all these with The Storied Life of A.J Fikry, and I thoroughly enjoy my time spent with A.J., Amelia, Maya, and detective Lambiase. No, I didn’t just enjoy my time. After three readings (my first encounter with this book was in Chinese, plus the first re-read in the original, and then another reread when I started selling the book as a bookseller myself), these characters have become so alive in my mind that to me, a publisher’s sales rep should be like Amelia, wide-eyed and charming but also strong-willed, whereas an independent bookseller should be like A.J., knowledgeable and picky but well-meaning.

Now, of course, working in the industry myself—especially in such a small market like Hong Kong—things aren’t so rosy. But it is precisely because of that I am all the more thankful to Miss Zevin for creating such a paradise for us book enthusiasts. In the end, the best books don’t just entertain or provide escapism, they renew your lens to look at the world with and give you hope. And we all need that extra thing with feathers, bookselling or not.

The Storied Life of A.J.Fikry pp.270 

Algonquin Books April 2014

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Filed Under: Also Trending, Featured - Reading, Free Reader's Essentials Tagged With: books on books, bookseller, character-driven, fiction, Gabrielle Zevin, literary fiction, novel, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

About the Blogger

My name is Robin Chan. I currently work as a book buyer for an independently owned English bookseller in Hong Kong. In general, I enjoy my work—getting to know all the new books, restocking the old ones I consider good books, curating lists and catalogs and writing about them and getting paid for all that. But it’s not possible to talk about all your personal favorites if you don’t own the business. So here I am, this is my personal business about everything I love in reading, and yes—you see it already—gaming. I started gaming pretty young and I am proud to say that I still thoroughly enjoy exploring new worlds and characters and narratives which sometimes in their own unique ways surpass the ways books interact with you, and of course, it’s the same for books the other way round. And this is where I explore the interactions of my two favorite mediums.

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