"Earlier this month, I kept picking up and putting down Lily King's new novel, Heart the Lover. I love King's writing but the opening section was hard for me to take - not in a grisly Cormac McCarthy or scary Stephen King kind of way - but in an "Ugh, I remember being that girl, that age" kind of way."
"Heart the Lover opens in a college class of the 1980s. The professor, a man, is teaching 17th-century British literature and he's selected a student's essay - a creative piece - to read aloud. But, first, he holds up the essay to remark on "its vulgar packaging" - the fact that it's typed on "neon-orange" paper. King's writing is so vivid, so immediate, that her opening sparked flashbacks of my own time in such classrooms,"
Casey Peabody, nicknamed Jordan by classmates, navigates college in the 1980s amid vivid classrooms and casual sexism. Two classmates, Sam and Yash, pursue Jordan, producing a charged first-love bond between Jordan and Yash and an imagined future in New York. Yash's loyalty to Sam and desire for autonomy create growing conflict that fractures relationships. The narrative returns decades later at a reunion in a dying man's hospital room, where middle-aged tensions, banal small talk, and melodramatic intensity converge. The story culminates in emotional devastation and a keen rendering of memory, longing, and the costs of choices.
Read at Kqed
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