King captures her guileless sense of awe with just a dusting of parody that never grows silly or bitter ... Tender ... With deft dialogue and knowing asides, King suggests Jordan’s nagging unease, the awkward feeling of wearing a cherished jacket that doesn’t quite fit right ... What’s particularly remarkable is how subtly King ages her narrator, preserving the kernel of that young woman’s openhearted urgency in the older woman’s complex voice ... Her style is too natural to be called poetic, but there’s definitely something poetic about her sense of narrative structure ... Only Lily King could tell a story so steeped in sorrow and so filled with hope.
For its first half...a wry, witty, exquisitely evocative campus tale, a fevered fiction of a youthful love triangle, and a reflection,...on the growth and development of a writer. By the end, it stands as one of the most emotionally devastating and soulfully wise novels I have ever read ... Literary without pretension, emotional without maudlin sentimentality. It must be said, however, that King skirts perilously close to the latter in Part 3, and it is a tribute to the power of her moral vision, the precision of her prose, and her animating empathy that the novel avoids bathos and pulls off these wild swerves convincingly ... Heartrending, swoonily romantic, rigorously clear-sighted.
Witty, insightful ... King is able to employ the best kind of humor: amusing comments that are funny not because of what is said but because we can hear exactly how the characters are saying them.
King is a master of sexual tension, of the slow build, of gratification torturously delayed. In this respect, Heart the Lover is her best work yet ... Once their relationship begins in earnest, its particulars are a lot less sexy and fun — but still King renders this downward parabola of disappointment as tantalizingly as its buildup ... The long-delayed revelations, like the tears, come fast and hot.
Ms. King is uncannily effective at drawing readers into her sympathetic young heroines’ struggles to find the life and romantic partnerships they crave ... Heart the Lover, like Writers & Lovers,feels at times as if it has been poured directly from the writer’s soul onto the page ... What starts as a campus novel leaps over decades to offer a more expansive view of life that spans the emotional gamut from elation to grief (Keep tissues handy) ... Captures the giddiness, passion and vulnerability of new love, along with the deep pull of family ... Ms. King seeds her love story with engaging dialogue and literary references that are never pretentious or gratuitous ... By the end of this deeply satisfying novel, time and distance have brought perspective and revelation aplenty to Ms. King’s characters, and to our understanding of them.
Achingly, gloriously sincere. You could say to a fault, except it’s clearly intentional. These are young people who want to fall into big feelings but also wonder if they can handle them at the same time ... Appreciating the way these two books are braided into the story of a life deepened my appreciation. The books could be read in any order, and if you’re looking to feel your feelings, you should check them out.
King wholly captures the highs and the heartbreak of a passionate college romance ... One of many lovely aspects of King’s writing is her ability to convey yearning as an integral component of character ... Has many individual sentences that glow like small gems, as with a character’s sudden awareness of a landscape ... Achingly poignant.
Steeped in yearning, melancholy and the reckoning with mortality that must come to us all ... It can also be very funny, often in a throwaway remark ... A celebration of fiction and how writing can help us to work through tumultuous feelings ... King...see[s] beauty in the smallest detail — an undone button, a yellow bedspread — and let[s] them echo through the tale ... King’s writing still pierces you.
King’s swoony story of love and literature, of paths taken and not taken, of the past selves we never truly leave behind, is quietly robust and nearly impossible to put down.
Enchanting ... King is not one for dramatic plot flourishes; instead she calibrates Jordan's story with superbly timed, understated revelations and dazzling dialogue that will keep readers riveted. Misfortune has a clarifying effect for the characters, exposing the worn and comforting patina of their friendship and forcing a reconciliation with past mistakes.
