Pushing down the original first paragraph a bit given the spoiler-y nature of it. We know from the blurb that something happens and our main trio of characters separate, so it’s not entirely spoiler, but it’s still details that might impede your enjoyment.
Or maybe not! This book, more than anything else, is about our main character, mostly unnamed, the titular Heart the Lover–King asks the question, what if you had a true love (lost) but also a facility with language? Could you process and move on better than us plebes?
Because the answer is mostly yes, the “special selected girl without girlfriends” characterization that King gives her MC is less jarring than it might otherwise be. A semi aimless creative writing (?) student at a college in Knoxville until she blossoms under the wing of two male friends, our MC has a relationship with one (Sam) and then the other (Yash), which causes no end of friction in the relationship between the two friends and ultimately in the relationship that MC has with Yash. She is truly, deeply in love and so incandescently happy in the first part that you know it can’t last long, and of course it does not.
Side note that her time with the female professor whose name I can’t recall brought me back to life. Our MC realizes that all her ostentatious male “old guard” professors would use pretentious quotes by Aristotle etc in lieu of helpful, concrete critique, and realizes how much better it is to get proper structured feedback… it’s hilarious, and I’m not doing a good job explaining.
I’m being a bit more generous given that this book jump scared me with my least favorite trope (accidental pregnancy) — but not its corollary, the abandoned pathway (wherein usually the female character is forced to make all different decisions as a result). I dislike this so much as a choice, and I would have savaged this book had our MC not become a published author.
End of the day, I felt like I had to do more work than needed to feel the feelings that King was evoking. It’s a very short book–maybe if it had been longer?
