January 20, 2020
Hellenga’s clunky, heavy-handed tale (after The Truth About Death) centers on a rare bookshop in Chicago’s Hyde Park. Gabe Johnson grows up around books in the 1970s, spending his time at the shop owned by his father and grandfather after his mother abandons the family when he is 12. After Gabe learns the business, his father, Charles, encourages a romance with Olivia, a young woman who works with them. Though the two become involved, “melting into each other’s dreams” while reading Keats and Wordsworth, Olivia disappears only to resurface numerous times throughout his life. In 1989, five years after Olivia’s first departure, the bookshop’s window display of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses is hit with a Molotov cocktail and a pregnant Olivia shows up at the scene. Though the shop is spared, Hellenga squeezes the attack along with the subsequent discovery of a pipe bomb for maximum narrative portent. Unexpectedly called to the maternity ward as the “father” of Olivia’s newborn, Gabe holds the child with a sense of dread over their future and that of the shop. As the plot moves forward to include the 21st-century realities of internet competition, Gabe finds he can still depend on love and death. This romance falls short of the poetry that inspires its characters.