Heart the Lover
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.
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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.
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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.
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