Is Heart the Lover the best Lily King book ever? I don't know. I remember really liking Writers & Lovers and Euphoria, and her book of short stories (Five Tuesdays in Winter) was solid too. But what I do know is that HTL is really really good and it made me want to buy and read all of King's other books (of which, so far, there are three).
Heart the Lover is the story of a college girl who befriends a pair of highly intelligent and intriguing guys, Sam and Yash. It doesn't take long before she's in an weirdly hot-and-cold relationship with Sam. This goes the way of most college relationships (or was it just mine?), and a few months after graduation everything comes crashing down. Then suddenly, disorientingly, it's Part II---maybe two decades later--and it takes me a minute to get my bearings. And a formerly great story becomes great and terrible. It's not all doom and gloom and sadness, but there's definitely a bunch of all of that. In fact, King imbues the entire book with intense emotion, somehow doing it without overdoing it.
I did not realize until LITERALLY the LAST PARAGRAPH OF THE BOOK that the main character in this one is also the main character in Writers & Lovers. (Is that a spoiler? Should I not have mentioned that? Or is this something that everyone other than a literary amnesiac would have realized far sooner? Anyway, it made me want to re-read W&L so I could solidify that link. Although, knowing me, by the time I get around to re-reading W&L I'll have forgotten everything I learned in HTL . . . ) This last-minute realization bumped it up a notch, from a book I really liked to a book that blew my mind.
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