A young mother abandons her two year old at a bookstore in a quaint town because she wants her daughter to grow up as a reader and among people who care about books.
A young mother abandons her two year old at a bookstore in a quaint town because she wants her daughter to grow up as a reader and among people who care about books.
The problem is that the bookstore owner, A.J. Fikry, is a 30-something widower, whose life skills begin and end with reading books and microwaving frozen vindaloo.
The expansive, but not exhaustive, information on Google he turns to, for raising the baby, is of little help. Yet the note from the baby’s mother that she be raised at Island Books “where no man is an island; but every book is a world” weighs on his conscience.
He retreats after reporting the baby at the police station and even contests to adopt her legally. And wins, with the rather “exceptionally verbal” baby proclaiming “adopted”, the second word she learns to mouth after “Google”.
But the book is not about Maya, the baby. It is about Ajay J. Fikry, the half-Indian Princeton graduate who threw up his PhD dissertation on the depiction of disease in Edgar Allen Poe’s works which he had grown to truly despise.
The suggestion came from his then girlfriend and later wife, Nicole, who was equally disgusted with her thesis on 20th century female poets, especially Slyvia Plath.They decide to be bookstore owners to lead a happier “literary life” and open Island Books in Nicole’s hometown, whose only connect to the mainstream world is through an erratic ferry service.
The lone bookstore in the town is soon a hit, mostly thanks to Nicole’s social skills. She organises book readings, invites authors and keeps the sales up till her sudden death.
Fikry is broken. He keeps himself half-alive reading books, but that does little for the sales. He is rude with customers and turns away publicists, refusing to stock books that he does not consider “literary”.
He once shoos off a publicist in a typical Fikrisque tone: “... I do not like post modernism, post-apocalyptic settings, post-modern narrators or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful non-fiction only, please.”
Fikry changes his book stocking ways only when Maya comes along. He is forced to wean himself off frozen food, lead a healthy life and fend for her. His first “convert” is a cop. He introduces Lambiase to crime fiction and then to literary works. Lambiase launches a book club for cops with arguments over characters and plots often going into heat mode and soon the cops are asked to leave their guns behind!
A women’s and children’s reading circuit is also floated. Women loaded with maternal instincts join in with the intention of spying and finding fault with madman Fikry’s raising of the baby.
Maya, too, plays her part, shoving books into kids’ hands who squat and wail till they can take the story books home.Though the book’s jacket is a little misleading and the blurb over-the-top Maya holding up two fingers to indicate she is two and then holding out her arms to hug Fikry the book is highly recommended for those who live and breathe books.
The parts where Fikry introduces Maya to books makes you want to cry. The chapterisation is unique all chapters bear the title of Fikry’s favourite books and are a tell all on how his own life is unfolding.
It is impossible not to fall in love with this quaint town and its people, the nucleus of whose existence is Island Books. It’s a Utopian town, that is so 21st century, yet so removed from the pace and madness of the mainland.
