Heart the Lover
by Lily King
The narrator of Heart the Lover, nicknamed Jordan throughout, meets two boys and best friends her senior year of college. These boys live together in the elegant home of their professor, who is on sabbatical. She joins their world fully and passionately, falling in love with both, but in bed with only one. It is these guys who nickname her Jordan, and in them she finds a level of friendship and intellectual stimulation she hasn’t found to date. But, as young love often does, this little love triangle goes belly up, and the ramifications can be felt for decades to follow.
It’s hard to explain the story of this book in a way that will do it justice. The premise sounds so quiet—so slice of life—but reading it feels like so much more than that. It’s a deeply intimate experiencing of something most of us have been through in real life: young, fervent, all consuming love.
The writing is absolutely superb. If you’ve read it—without spoilers—the last chapter, the scene in the airport on the escalator…just, wow. Every single thing in this novel felt like an intentional choice by King, including the fact that two key characters (ok now some mild spoilers to come), ”Heart the Lover” and Jordan’s son, Jack, were on exact opposite paths in reverse. They were foils for each other, and following Heart the Lover’s path is what allowed her to become fully herself: he became the cosmic sacrifice to save her son.
Lily King always writes with a level of emotional intimacy, awareness, and sensitivity that’s so wise and not found in many books, and the result is a deeply moving story about love (both romantic and platonic) and friendship that also allows the reader to walk a path with Jordan that shows how forgiveness (of others and self) can be truly transformative.