Author: Lily King
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 256 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (NC, ME, NY), France
Summary: You knew I’d write a book about you someday.
Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.
In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter, and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love, and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, the choices made will alter these three lives forever.
Decades later, the vulnerable days of Jordan's youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
Review: I haven't read a Lily King novel before, and in fact, just didn't read her previous novel for my in-person book group. But this one is getting such good press that I had to read it. I am really glad that I did.
King does a great job at capturing the flightiness and seriousness of youth, which somehow manage to coexist at the same time when we're young. Discussing "deep" literature before we've really lived, "falling in love" too young and too quickly (yes, that's my interpretation), and making life decisions that we're not ready to make all clash in our late teens and early 20s. This is how "Jordan," Sam, and Yash experienced their time together, and it is exciting, fun, tense, and beautiful. This is a tale of family, both blood and found.
I liked how King brought us into the characters' present, twenty-odd years on from college, as life has settled down, there are marriages and kids, and just when you think things are going along smoothly, life throws in a huge curveball. How do old friends come together, deal with unresolved past issues, share secrets, and care for one another in times of crisis? You'll have to read this novel to find out.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Bookish--characters are authors and English majors
- Literary Escapes--North Carolina
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