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For the literary crowd

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2020

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Writers & Lovers is not a light read or a beach read. It is clearly literary fiction and the intended audience is people who are literary themselves. With that being said, it can come off a little pretentious. It is slow moving because it is much more focused on character development and literary elements than on a fast-paced plot. However, that doesn't mean it isn't a good read. For me, it was a satisfying read, but it probably won't be one of my favorites of the year.

It took me a while to get into, but I did find myself invested in it. I wanted Casey to get her life together and have her dreams come true. Now that she is in her thirties, most of her friends have given up on their creative passions and pursued more "normal" careers and lives. Along the way, Casey writes and falls in and out of love with other writers and struggles to deal with the grief of losing her mother suddenly. So, it felt like a book for an audience of writers and other creative artists.

I feel like this one quote from the book sums up the whole book itself: "It's really a book about art and becoming an artist and all the ways it ruins people, actually."

This Is Not Nothing

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2020

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It is difficult becoming an adult, at times, and in particular when you are in your 30’s. Not settled, no profession of means, no permanent relationship, no offspring, just a muddle. Casey feels all of this and more. Full of debt that grows larger everyday, a job as a waitress, living in a potting shed, and writing a novel that is just taking forever.

Casey aka Camila, lives near Boston, commutes to her waitress job in Boston on her banana bike. She has friends, a jerk for a landlord and her book. She tries not to think too much about her top three worries, her mother’s recent death, her huge student loans, and the man she met this summer, a married poet who swept her off her feet. While she is involved in the grief she feels from her mother’s death, she is trying to live, to be kind and care about others, without her need to hide all the feelings. Everything around her feels the cynicism, that is the way to make it through the day.

This novel by Lily King is fresh, vibrant, the characters leap off the page. In this day of digital devices, it is refreshing to have a young woman finding her way with every mistake she makes, but holding onto her dreams. She wants love, a family, but her grief and her uncertainty are holding her back. Casey has two lovers, a promise of a better job, and must make decisions. She is aware of her peccadilloes, and, in this way she is learning her craft. Her writing carries her, and her friends and her work reinforce this need. She has to write she says not because she thinks she has something to say. She writes because when she doesn’t everything feels worse. This is not nothing.

Recommended. prisrob 03-03-2020

JQuindaro

A nuanced look at things that matter.

Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2020

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I Kindled this the day it came out and now that I've finished I can finally resume my life, reluctant though I may be to leave this congenial narrator and her finely rendered world. This is literary fiction of the best kind, not bogged down in overwrought sentences or hyper-emotionalism. The prose is clear and concise and the relationships between Casey and the two writers in her life are finely drawn. Her monetary woes and the death of her mother (we know from the start) and the problems with her father are believable and not sentimentalized. The setting is Boston, and you feel like you're there, but her descriptions are always on point and never gratuitous. But mostly, I just liked the whole deal! Lily King is a smart writer and made me feel like a smart reader.

JB

A lot of problems...

Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2020

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Words to describe the writing: Pretentious, cliche, and filled with platitudes.

I wanted to like this book, but the main character is just over-privileged and annoying.

I was also disappointed that the tension in the plot comes down to her love life in a very chicklit style rather than a deeper and more intriguing study of what it truly means to write and what it means to be a woman trying to access deeper truths in her writing that she can't seem to get in her real life.

Could've been much, much better.

Top reviews from other countries

A.

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 30, 2020

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I've read all of Lily King's novels; each one has been better than the previous, with Euphoria a major triumph. So Writers & Lovers was a real disappointment for me, a slip back to her earlier work, which - while certainly not bad - isn't particularly good either.

There's something cold about Writers & Lovers, slight and insubstantial. The writing is occasionally quite good, with some amusingly sparky dialogue, but the novel never takes off, the characters a mere watercolor shadow of what they could be. At no point during the novel did I find myself caring what happened to Casey or indeed to any other characters apart from Harry and the two young boys, who were written with the charm that the others lacked.

I really wanted to love this book, and I really was excited when it finally came out - I've been waiting a long time for Lily King's next book - so I admit my expectations were high. Unfortunately, they were ultimately disappointed.

Bryony Barker

A cliche but easy read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 11, 2020

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Lovers and Writers looked like it was going to be a great new book release, the novel claiming to explore the transition from youth to adulthood, handling expectations, death, relationships and work. But it didn’t quite fulfil it’s potential.
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Lily Kings presents us with a main character who recently lost her mother and in processing her grief has also lost her way in life. Casey is the familiar female struggling protagonist, weighed down by a mountain of debt and haunted with a book she’s been trying to write for years. She immediately becomes the cut and paste of every character in every book about a person trying to write a book.
King makes Casey is a slow and melancholic main character with no significant personality, romanticising her bike ride to and from work as her only moment of relief. Naturally, Casey has had strained romantic relationships in the past, and as she’s trying to get her life together, two men enter the narrative with the formula of turmoil followed by resolution.

There were glimpses of great writing but the narrative never seemed to take colour - like everything was written in a grey sepia tone which made it feel ambivalent. Interestingly, the parts that stood out for me was Casey’s job as a waitress in a busy venue. King captured the workplace politics and culture of working in a restaurant so well I could have read an entire novel about that. But at no point did I care for the characters. I wasn’t charmed by Casey overcoming the issues she’d been ignoring or how she finally started living her life. It was addictive simply because it was easy to read, not because I was invested in what was happening.
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I saw what King was trying to do in this book, and for a while, I couldn’t decide if it was good or crippling cliche. With more time, polish and planning something could be there. And while it wasn’t a bad book, it’s not one I’ll be rushing to tell my friends about.

Charles Pargeter

Overwrought

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 18, 2020

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Had this been a first novel, its faults would be more excusable. A novel about a writer having her emotional turmoil sorted out by getting her first novel accepted should be a first novel, and I wondered whether it was a manuscript that the established novelist Lily King had written a long time ago and gone back to. It is well-written, but in that kind of writers' circle style of writing. Each sentence and scene has been worked over many times, possibly in reaction to the comments of others, so it becomes a sequence of separate events, rather than a satisfactorily flowing narrative. You cannot fault the quality of the writing or the amount of hard work that's gone into it, but the main reaction from this reader was; 'It must have taken hours.' And it's far too long to carry the its fairly lightweight emotional depth.

SusannahB

Good in Parts

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 3, 2020

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I haven't read a novel by Lily King before, but she has been recommended to me and the premise of this particular book interested me; however, although there were some aspects to this novel that I enjoyed, overall it didn't quite live up to my expectations. After an unsuccessful love affair, Casey, a young writer, very much in debt and struggling with her first novel and also with the grief of losing her mother, finds herself back in Massachusetts and living in converted shed alongside the home of a friend of her brother's for a reduced rent - providing she walks his dog and puts up with his sarcastic comments about her writing. Working double shifts as a waitress, she meets widower Oscar, a middle-aged author who has two young boys, and all three of them are immediately drawn to Casey, and Oscar is soon asking her for a date. Casey finds Oscar attractive and his two boys are lovely, but she has already met the younger and more attractive Silas who, having lost a sister, appears to empathize with her grief over her mother and is also encouraging about her writing. However, Silas, who cancels their first proper date, seems rather elusive and unreliable - which, although attracts her in some ways, also worries her in others; after all she is just out of one unsuccessful love affair and Oscar seems to be offering her a more stable and mutually beneficial relationship and one with the added attraction of his two adorable boys. Desperately missing her mother and suffering from panic attacks, and working all hours at waitressing and trying to find the time, energy and inspiration for her novel, Casey finds it difficult to cope with life on her own, let alone trying to decide between two men, both of whom seem to be offering her something different. Does she choose either of them? Or neither of them? And when she finally finishes her novel, will she be able to find a publisher?

As commented in my opening paragraph, there were parts to this novel that I enjoyed, especially the parts relating to Casey's writing and her enjoyment of literary novels; however, there was too little of this and the section of the book where she is interviewed for a teaching job and talks to her interviewer about her love of literature was just a tiny part of the story. Also, although I sympathized with Casey over the loss of her mother (and the author - whom, I believe, has recently lost her own mother - writes with emotional intelligence of the effects of losing a parent), I didn't feel I ever really got to know her or really understood what 'made her tick'. And, apart from Oscar's two sons, about whom I really enjoyed reading, I didn't find any of the other protagonists particularly sympathetic and I felt Silas and Oscar were not fully-fleshed as characters. I also felt the story ended too quickly and too neatly for someone whose life was in such a mess, but I can't explain further for risk of spoilers. So, a but of a mixed reading experience and one that, for me, didn't quite live up some of the accolades on the jacket cover, but I'm glad I've read it and, having enjoyed some parts of this book, I might take a look at some of Ms King's earlier novels.

3 Stars.

Sabina

Set in Boston 1997

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 22, 2020

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Perhaps being written in first person present tense has something to do with the frequent repetition of I, I, I , contributing to a sense of a self-involved narrator with whom I should be involved with too, yet somehow I'm not. Casey is bereaved and cries a lot and I should be feeling empathy, so why am I feeling detached? This was a puzzle to me for the first half of the book, by which time she becomes interested in two very different guys who appear in her life, and I wanted to know the outcome.
The pressures of lack of money, some health problems and the struggles to complete the book she is writing compound the sense of loss (for her mother and a past relationship), while the dilemmas about Silas and Oscar create a frisson and tension to add to this mix. I liked her descriptions of her waitressing job, the banter with friends as well as the scenes with Oscar's small sons whom Casey increasingly spends time with.
Things come to a head and there is a conclusion. So I quite enjoyed the second half, but somehow wasn't convinced by the whole novel.

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