Book Review: *How to Buy a Love of Reading* by Tanya Egan Gibson

How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson

Back-of-the-book blurb:  Asked to name her favorite book, sixteen-year-old Carley Wells answers, “never met one I liked.” Her parents are horrified and decide to commission a book to be written just for her. They will be the Medicis of Long Island and buy their daughter The Love of Reading. At first, Carley’s sole interest in the project is to distract Hunter, the young bibliophile she adores. But as Hunter’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic, Carley begins to understand the importance of stories-and how they are powerful enough to destroy a person. Or save her.

She Is Too Fond of Books’ review:  If you are a reader eager to explore a new-to-you genre, How to Buy a Love of Reading might be the place for you to get your first taste of meta-fiction.  What is meta-fiction?, you ask … according to Wikipedia, it is “a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion.”  Characters are aware that they’re in a book, they and the narrator speak to the reader at times.  This novel was a good way for me to give a fair assessment of the genre, since it employs literary themes that I live and love daily.

In the case of How to Buy a Love of Reading, these characters are quirky and exaggerated – from women who have been nipped and tucked until there’s barely any semblance of their original shape, to men who carry on affairs and toss around tales of their financial gains like one big fish story.  They are entertaining caricatures of upper-class snobbery.  The setting itself is a caricature (setticature?) of a wealthy bubble – mansions with guest cottages bigger than the average person’s home, complete with a fleet of staff to answer to every whim, and a country club that is the place to see and be seen (and to compete in such categories as who can throw the most lavish party and who can flash the largest diamond).

What they’re not seeing is their own children.  Francis and Gretchen Wells see only Carley’s size – she is overweight (not morbidly so, but in this society, anyone larger than a size 2 is sent off to ‘fat camp’ for the summer), and they focus on this, not her personality, her relationships, or her interests.  When another Fox Glen resident hosts a party similar to the one the Wellses were planning for Carley’s Sweet Sixteen bash, it’s time to start from scratch with a new plan to outdo the competition – hire an author to write a book for Carley, with this book-hating teen as the main character.

How to Buy a Love of Readinghas a lot to keep a reader’s interest – characters discussing plot, dialogue, setting, and pacing, as they look out from the pages of the novel.  The author whom Francis and Gretchen have hired is referred to in a mock-reverential style as Author, with a capital A, although she is in fact an “unknown” author, in counterpoint to a (fictitious) famous author in the novel, known as Rock Star.

Any author or work of literature is unknown to Gretchen, who seems baffled by the author’s (“Author” aka “Bree”) mention of Chaucer.  Perhaps Gretchen would have been more comfortable hiring a designed with whom she could discuss Prada and Versace (p 64):

The Author was quizzing her, Gretchen was certain, sneering the way the authors assigned to each table at the O’Neil Foundation for Adult Literacy dinners always did at women like Suzanne, entertained by moneyed ignorance.  She’d so hoped for a friendly writer when they’d started shopping for one, or at least one who wrote comprehensible books and didn’t show up for contract signings wearing a bowling shirt, gauchos, and fishnet stockings.

Gibson inserts footnotes as part of the text.  I marked one paragraph (p 190) which had not only a footnote embedded in the text (one of five in the chapter), but also a parenthetical “Narrator’s note” in which the narrator speaks in an aside directly to the reader.

How to Buy a Love of Readingis a very clever construct which will intrigue the reader who enjoys puzzles and word play, especially those employing literary terms.  Gibson peppers the novel with sly commentary; I often wondered if she was speaking through her characters to make a statement about misplaced admiration of wealth and fame.

Through no fault of this novel, I’ve decided that meta-fiction isn’t for me.  Although I appreciate the complexities in crafting such an elaborate plot, and find the blur between fiction and reality to be fresh and unusual, I want to either get lost in a book when I’m reading, not to be reminded of my role as “reader.”  This was the second book of metafiction that I’ve read, and a fun one with which to cement that lesson.

What about you?  Are you a fan of metafiction?  How many books in a specific genre do you read before deciding it’s not your type?