Tom Story’s THE BOOK COLLECTOR TRILOGY is a small but well-formed novella. Split into three “books”—“The Book Collector,” “The Book Collected,” and “The Book Collection”—it tells the story of how a bond between father and son stretches, breaks, and is re-formed over years and decades. This is all intertwined with a hint of magic and fate at work—as well as the deep, visceral love of books.
Initially, “The Book Collector” has a Silas Marner-ish feel: miserly not with money, but with his own feelings. When a young boy enters the shop, the old man’s defenses begin to drop; as the two strike up a friendship, he finds his affection for the boy growing. The work wears its symbolism on its sleeve: “The Book of Memories,” protected behind a glass case, is the one book the boy is not yet allowed to read—which telegraphs the plot somewhat. “The Book Collected” gives us the backstory: the Book Collector’s earlier money troubles and failed marriage; his drifting away from his son as he gets older, and the storybooks they used to share fading into a rarely dwelled-upon shared past. Nothing is left to chance in terms of ambiance. There are few other characters to shore up emotional dynamics, but author Tom Story presses the elements into service; wind, rain, and thunder at times mirror the Book Collector’s mood, and sunlight is a constant theme.
At 75 pages, the work is short, and the mode of storytelling is sometimes noticeably expositional. The reader is often told what’s going on emotionally between father and son, rather than being allowed to form such opinions organically through action. There is also lots of sentimentalism on display, and not merely by dint of the bittersweet ending. Utterances, gestures, and expressions are regularly imbued with all sorts of fine meanings that, again, remove suspense and require the reader to do very little in the way of inference.
However, THE BOOK COLLECTOR TRILOGY is diverting, moving, and ultimately rather touching in its expression of a sentiment every parent and guardian—and, indeed, bookstore owner—will recognize only too well: “Help them when they’re ready.”
Tom Story’s THE BOOK COLLECTOR TRILOGY offers a sentimental, heartfelt look at childhood, the love of books, and the responsibilities of parenting.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader