would desire as well as delivering real emotional weight whenever the plot takes more serious turns. Hale’s Amy is charming in her earnestness, easy to understand as someone A.J. Nayyar makes A.J.’s grumpiness and straightforwardness if not always charming, certainly funny and earned enough to make us root for him. However, those who can accept the picturesque views of lighthouses and the artfully disheveled look of A.J.’s bookstore will eventually be rewarded.įor one, the performances are universally strong.

Those elements alone will likely alienate a lot of viewers. Indeed, everything from the costumes, to the quaint production design for Alice Island, to the bright cinematography emphasizes how adorable this world is. The trouble starts early, the second the overly cutesy score by Starr Parodi and Jeff Eden Fair begins to play. However, condensed into a single, 105-minute film, neither Zevin, director Hans Canosa or his game cast can make the narrative feel like anything but a cloying Lifetime melodrama. And maybe if the book had been adapted into a miniseries, those same plot points would have had the room to breathe. In novel form, Zevin, who also adapted the screenplay, gets away with so many plot threads by weaving them in a way that makes even their most farfetched intersections feel like fate’s grand design. That plot description alone already sounds like a lot to cover-and that’s without mentioning subplots about A.J.’s sister-in-law, Ismay (Christina Hendricks) and her famous novelist husband, Daniel Parrish (Scott Foley).

raises Maya over the next dozen or so years, he opens up again, finding a friend in the town’s Police Chief Lambiase ( David Arquette) and a budding romance with Amy (Lucy Hale), a sales rep from a small publishing house who visits him seasonally. However, his life changes when a troubled young woman leaves her toddler, Maya (Charlotte Thanh Theresin), in his care. Kunal Nayyar (who most viewers will recognize from The Big Bang Theory) plays Fikry, the owner of a failing bookstore on a remote Massachusetts island who starts the novel as a grieving widower. So, of course, it’s now been adapted into a film.

A book essentially about the joy of reading, its whimsical tone and sprawling narrative delighted book lovers. Back in 2014, writer Gabrielle Zevin’s slim novel, The Storied Life of A.J.

The storied life of aj fikry novel