Casey is a 31-year old woman and this is the story of her
past and present. She’s an aspiring novelist and has been working on her novel
for 6 years. She’s a waitress, lives in
a potting shed behind her landlord’s house, and owns a bike for
transportation. She has traveled a lot,
is in serious debt thanks to student loans, and her mother recently died
unexpectedly.
Writers and Lovers by Lily King does not grab you.
Casey isn’t particularly noteworthy.
The above paragraph describes basically all we know of her before the
book shifts predominantly into her love life.
She has had a variety of lovers. That is all well and good. But halfway
through the novel, I was still trying to figure out the point of this novel. It
was often disjointed. When would something happen to make me care? I think I might’ve dropped it if I’d had
another audiobook on hand. However, it did benefit from an amazing narrator and
also from lots of surprising humor! This novel caused me to laugh out loud
probably more than any other novel I’ve read in recent memory! Halfway through,
it finally became cohesive and more engaging.
I am pretty sure that people who love literary fiction and
analyzing novel structures and literary devices would enjoy this novel more
than I did. I saw glimmers of
foreshadowing and allegories without trying very hard. I get the feeling there
is a lot more of that if I really wanted to find it. I picked up some
references (both direct and indirect) to other authors and their work, perhaps
as an homage. But, that is not how I
enjoy reading. I just prefer a good story and characters about whom I care.
The narrator was Stacey Glemboski and she was fabulous. She gave Casey a much more tolerable
personality than I might have given her myself and this definitely helped me
enjoy the novel more. She displayed
great voice acting and different character voices. I give her an A+.
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