Maureen Corrigan

Three classes later, he takes a seat beside me.

Soon, he is walking me across campus.

We talk exclusively about the class.

He's not focusing enough on Cromwell, Sam says.

I agree.

What else can I do?

I am a mere student, and he is a scholar.

That much is clear right away.

And Sam isn't even a grad student.

He's a senior, like me.

Later, I go to the library and read about who Cromwell was.

Now, young Jordan is no pushover.

She's ambitious, putting herself through college on loans and waitressing jobs, and she harbors a barely formed desire to be a writer.

But her path will take longer to carve out.

The well-read Bright Boys, meanwhile, house-sit and are invited to dinners by their male professors.

They're the heirs apparent to the kingdom of books and ideas.

Jordan's gifts are wrapped in the wrong packaging, just like her orange construction paper essay.

King's writing is so vivid, so immediate, that her opening sparked flashbacks of my own time in such classrooms.

But sexism is just the way things are, not the subject of this intensely moving novel.

Heart the Lover is both a prequel and a sequel to King's novel Writers and Lovers, which made my Best of the Year list in 2020.