What readers think of Heart the Lover, plus links to write your own review.

This is a love story that doesn't follow the rules of a love story—as in, girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, girl and boy suffer a broken relationship, girl and boy reconcile…and live happily ever after. Instead, this is a love story that is raw, passionate, (very!) sexy, and impossible to stop reading.

But it breaks all the rules. It's brilliant!

Magnificently written by Lily King (who may just be my new favorite author), this is the story of college student Jordan, an English major and creative writer, who meets two young men her senior year who totally change her life: best friends and housemates Sam and Yash. In addition to encouraging her take herself, her studies, and her innate creativity more seriously than she has ever done before, Jordan first enjoys them both as dear friends but soon starts dating Sam. However, her real crush is for Yash and he for her. It's a weird love triangle with lots of hurt feelings. She and Yash get together after Sam drops her, and a passionate, intense, wildly delirious love affair begins. They graduate and grow up and begin their lives, loving and hurting each other in ways that will mark them always. The choices they make as young lovers, often on the spur of the moment and based on feverish emotions, will forever alter the course of their lives.

This short novel—just 188 pages—is an intelligent and captivating celebration of young love, unbridled passion, forgiveness, and redemption. It is filled with joy and tragedy. It will wreck your heart and stir your soul. And you won't want it to ever end.

But when it does end, there is a bit of a surprise, which you'll only understand if you have already read Lily King's "Writers and Lovers."

Lily King is an auto-buy for me and Heart the Lover did not disappoint. This is a slight novel - told in 3 sections over 3 decades. The first section sets up “Jordan” - the persona the narrator adopts in college - and her two friends, Yash and Sam, both of whom she’ll become romantically involved. The next section details a reunion of sorts between Yash and Jordan when she’s newly married to Silas and the mom of two young boys. The third section is a sad coda to the lives of all 3 characters. The book is filled with the longing and tragedy of young love. King is an extraordinarily gifted writer and this story will stay with me for a long time to come.

Lily King’s bizarre “Heart the Lover” paints the kind of social arrangement (the terms“relationship” and “friendship” do not necessarily cover what they have) that none of us knew in college. If you were in Honors, you may relate to their relentless pursuit of academia. Perhaps I just saw it as a means to an end, while the protagonists think deeply.

When modern literature describes a “love triangle” in the short blurb, you expect something very literal. Sam, Yash, and Jordan have something more intellectually incompatible, leading to deep, meaningful conversations. The friends reunite over the span of three timelines, some hopeful and others tragic, when they share their banter even in the face of suffering and the recognition of mortality.

If you are in your forties and have had past loves in college that you thought were the one, your mind will wander to those “off-ramps” immediately and understand Jordan’s plight. King tries the tricky second-person narrative in the middle without revealing to whom she is speaking, although we have an inkling. She is at the right age for reminiscing.

“Heart the Lover” refers to the Queen of Hearts in a game called “Sir Hincomb Funnibuster,” and how the main character, Sam, signs his letters. You learn the rest slowly. All of this drama and hardship lead to an incredibly sad but predictable ending that packs enough emotion and significance to let you forgive yourself for seeing it coming early.

Most well-known critics point out that the ending is sad, and they are not wrong, but I found peace in their acceptance of life. The philosophy that the present is the only reality holds true, as the past confounds the characters here, and they struggle, despite their advanced education, to accept that they cannot change what has already occurred there.