I'm not sure how my thoughts are going to come across to others as I have quite mixed feelings about this book. I apologize if I make little sense, but these are my feelings as they came to me throughout my reading of this book. 
 About halfway through the book, I was thinking my rating was going to be falling somewhere between a 2 and a 3. I was having a difficult time relating to any of the characters and thought our main character (A.J. Fikry) was slightly cliched, if not a slightly irritating individual to read about. He definitely had mannerisms that I had a difficult time accepting. The other characters felt pretty flat comparatively and so I couldn't find much to hold onto as far as characters go, and ultimately even if I don't like the plot of a story, I can usually find characters that I like. 
 Then I read through to the ending (no spoilers here), and I felt tugs at my heartstrings and maybe felt a little like crying - I swear it's because I'm a woman at a certain time of my life (and perhaps month). So based on that, I felt like I wanted to bump up my rating by almost a full star - which I don't feel quite justified to do based on some of my other ideas about the book. All in all, I think my official rating would have a to be 3.75, but I just can't bring myself to round up my Goodreads rating because of other issues (which I will be discussing shortly), and because I feel slightly cheated out of my "bad score" after the ending's toying with my emotions. 
 So what were my issues throughout this story? 
 1: The pacing of this story & lack of descriptions. (Yes I'm grouping these together and you will see why.) 
 The pace of this story felt as though it were a breakneck speed, which I can definitely appreciate in certain books, but the breakneck speed of this book was due to the lack of descriptions and prose that the author chose to use. Everything was told to us and not shown (ironically enough, this is a concept that several of the characters discuss in this novel), and it was because of this that I felt wholeheartedly disconnected from just about all the characters through multiple semi-climactic scenes. No spoilers, but there is a car crash and you would think that yes, that scene would be pretty breakneck (no pun intended) as car crashes happen quite quickly without time for people to think. However, there was so little description that I was almost left guessing whether or not it had actually happened. After the fact, there is little to no discussion of the accident, which also leads you to wonder if it was a big deal or not. I understand it was used as a plot device within the story and so was needed, but could we please spend more than just one short paragraph discussing the accident and its after effects? The pacing drove me nuts and I think I would have appreciated the prose/pacing more if there had been just a little more thought process and description on the author's part. 
 #2: The plot itself. 
 Everything within this story could have happened. In fact, who knows, maybe multiple events from this story have literally happened to people. I, however, felt like I almost needed to suspend my belief in order to feel like I really believed in and could respond to the story. It's all very plausible, but not likely in any way, shape or form when all put together. The things that did it for me most were several events that happened right away in the first few chapters of the story. 
 (1) A toddler is left in a bookstore because the mother no longer wants it/cannot care for it (we don't really know why because we never "see" the mother). Plausible yes and I was with the story on this first point. (2) The toddler's intelligence and acquisition of language is so profound that she is reading board books by the time she is 2 and chapter books by about the age of 5. Yes, it is plausible, but not likely. It was around this time that I felt like I needed to begin suspending my belief. (3 and this technically happens before either of the first two plot points) A.J.'s book, Tamerlane, is randomly stolen while he is asleep and he literally doesn't notice at all that someone had come into his house and stolen a very valuable item until after he wakes up. He feels so upset about this that this leads him to begin leaving his door unlocked because he feels there is nothing for people left to steal. These three points added together are what made me feel like I needed to suspend my belief for the rest of the story. Things were aligned a little too nicely for me. It was like a child's book: If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk to go with it. And the milk will make him think of this, and that will make him want that. Blah, blah, blah. Basically, I felt like it was too formulaic in nature and everything had a perfect little spot in the plot for where it was supposed to fit. 
 BUT!!! At the end of the day, that ending tugged at my little heartstrings and made me really FEEL something. Made me feel something even though I felt even as far as halfway through that I didn't like or at the very least, didn't feel much of anything for the characters of this book. This was a cutesy little story about how one person's life can be so completely turned around by a few key events. The concepts about family, love, and how people act towards others were what made me feel like at the end of the story I needed to bump up my overall rating. I quite liked the short story recommendations at the beginning of each chapter (even if I didn't quite appreciate their descriptions or their ties into the chapters' key plot points). Overall, I give this a 3.75 rating and no, I just can't quite bring myself to round up.