Kelly Link's The Book of Love - Book Club Discussion

The Book of Love Book Discussion

Sunday, October 27, 2024, 5-7 pm   
Ada’s Technical Books, 425 15th Ave E, Seattle, WA 98112  
This meeting is free, but we encourage attendees to support Ada’s by purchasing the book at the store. Buy The Book

This event coincides with Kelly’s appearance at Town Hall as part of Ted Chiang Presents: Love, Hope, and Other Four Letter Words with the Seattle Arts & Lectures on Monday, October 28th at Town Hall Seattle. Join the book club and attend the SAL event as a group! It’s a great chance to dive deep into Link’s work before hearing from the author herself! Attendees will receive a free ticket to the Seattle Arts & Lectures event.

Whether you’re a longtime fan or new to Kelly Link’s magical worlds, join other readers for a guided book club discussion of The Book of Love, led by Clarion West Board Chair and six-week alum Shweta Adhyam.

What to expect: 

• Purchase a copy of The Book of Love at Ada's Books, an indie bookstore near you, or pick up a copy at your library as early as you can. Read the book! 
• Meet Shweta and other readers at Ada's Books on Sunday, October 26, for a guided discussion, and get your free ticket to the Seattle Arts & Lectures event.
• Go to Seattle Arts & Lectures event the next day and enjoy additional insights from Kelly Link and Ted Chiang.

About The Book of Love:

In The Book of Love, welcome to Kelly Link’s incomparable Lovesend, where you’ll encounter love and loss, laughter and dread, magic and karaoke, and some really good pizza. Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are.

With them in the room 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 the bargain their music 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.

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.

About the Author:

Kelly Link, a MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow, is the author of the collections Get in Trouble, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts.

About the Host:

Shweta Adhyam belongs to Madras, and Seattle, and speculative fiction.  She speaks five languages, has had four careers, is three layers of immigrant, calls two cities home, and believes escapism is of the first importance. She is frenemies with ADHD, knows far more about Hindu mythology than is good for her, and attended Clarion West in 2017.  She lives with her spouse and child.

About Seattle Arts & Lectures

Seattle Arts & Lectures cultivates transformative experiences through story and language with readers and writers of all generations. Learn more: https://lectures.org/about/