Love Letter to Literature
Title:The Book of Secrets
Author:Elizabeth Joy Arnold
Publisher: Bantam Books
Genre: Fiction/ Literature/ Books About Books
Length: 450 pages
I checked this book out from the library, but this is not a library book. This is a book you need three copies of – a hardback first edition signed by the author, a copy for reading and scribbling notes in the margins, and a copy to loan to your friends. I’m devastated that I’ll be shoving it through a book drop later this afternoon, it will leave my hands and slide down a shoot to be re-cataloged and re-shelved. When all I really want to do is sleep with it under my pillow.
I was up all night reading. Not all night, but well passed my thirty year old motherhood appropriate bedtime.
Part One was titled Chronicles of Narnia, Part Two: Where the Wild Things Are, and so on – each section of the book titled and designed to reflect story that tied ever so gracefully into a famous book title. The whole book is not just a riveting story, it is a love letter to literature.
If you are a Kate Morton fan, the architecture of this book will be right up your alley. It’s beautifully done, marvelously written, and simultaneously raw and eloquent. It may even be better than anything Kate Morton wrote, and saying that feels like blasphemy because I adore her and own all her books.
There were so many gorgeous quotes I wanted to underline, and now I don’t know where they were in the book, because it was a library copy so I couldn’t. I should have jotted them down, but I was too eager to read what would come next. The whole reading experience was captivating and surreal.
“I thought it was a dream,” Thomas said. We were sitting in the library…
Anakalian Whims 
Unexpected Odes to Literature | Anakalian Whims said,
June 10, 2014 at 11:19 pm
[…] you recall my review of The Book of Secrets you should be well aware of how much I cherish this particular aspect of storytelling. I love […]