Writers & Lovers: Lily King

I love this book.

It took some time to get into this book.stick with it, it’s worth it. Don’t read it in bits though, put aside some time and the story grows and develops. I read it in one day, uninterrupted and that, I believe, made all the difference.

Loved the writing in this book- amusing, deeply felt, fresh and surprising word choices . The central character and her dilemma were quite real and involving. Read it a second time just to savor her words and sentences.

I had a really hard time getting past the first half of waitressing, and frustrated writer. Not much happened, the ending was well expected. No surprises

I found this book tiresome in its vague plotting and lack of commitment to any substantial story. It's like a very soft and gentle "Fleabag," but with almost no sex between dating characters (oddly chaste, which is weird! It's the 90s!), only a bit of humor, and with a wounded young woman who cries every time she thinks about her dead mother (I'm not exaggerating -- every time she thinks about her, she cries, which is often, and often on a bike, for some reason). She's off-beat, a waitress/slash/writer with a banana bike and a load of potential medical issues which make no sense, dropped in and then resolved willy-nilly, without feeling remotely necessary or real. (No doctor would make a woman wait 7 weeks to check a huge lump in her breast, for starters.) She lives in a shed, which I guess makes her cool and kooky. Her nerves are bad and she 'buzzes' a lot. She was once good at golf. (?) Men, for no reason that I can discern, fall hard for her, even an older successful author who could clearly do a whole lot better. Nothing else happens. I liked Euphoria, didn't love it. She lost me completely on this one.

The author has a way of really bringing you into the story, I felt what Casey felt, although this was not always a good thing. I almost took away a star for the book making me feel depressed and stressed out ;-) But I can't fault an author who is so good that you lose yourself into her writing. It's also very brave to have not only the main character, but most others, be writers, and to include lots of discussion of how to write, what is good writing and so on. Because that puts what you are reading up to that scrutiny. Lily King does not disappoint, she delivers all of the things her characters say make up a great novel.

I just loved it. I can’t wait to read her first novel. It’s not chick lit, but so much smarter. Her turn of phrase is so delicious!I didn’t think it was pretentious as others have said, that puzzles me a bit. She’s a waitress and a writer living in a very basic garden shed- I don’t get pretentious from that, the main character is sad and broken, not a bit snobby. But fascinating and just a great read. Highly recommended.

The beautiful prose and engaging protagonist had me hooked on this novel from the start. Casey’s refusal to sell out and become a proper grown up with a sensible job, a family and a mortgage is a vicarious thrill. Despite life-ruining debt, ever-present grief and her poverty-line lifestyle, Casey is committed to the novel she has been writing for the past six years. No matter how hard life gets or how often people let her down, Casey never loses her joie de vivre or quirky sense of humor. I cannot recommend this novel enough, especially to anyone going through hard times.

It was fairly well written, but a bit light weight.

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.-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.-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.

I am always pleased to discover a novel about the writing process, and often even more excited when I discover it has been written by a debut author. Although this author already has a few good titles under her belt, this is the first novel of hers I have read.The novel takes us through the lifeline of a struggling writer who has spent the best part of six years working on and off on a novel while trying to hold down various jobs. Her personal life is tricky, and one of her suitors is a widower, a successful author. The reader is navigated through the ups and downs of the protagonist's life, and how life tends to run along the waiting for an hour and then three buses come along all at once route.I can't say too much more because I will spoil the ending. The second half of the book is pacier than the first. Recommended read.

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.