Heart the Lover by Lily King (audiobook)

 genre: literary fiction

Our narrator loves words.  She is at college to study them and hopefully, maybe, write her own book someday.  And when she meets Sam and his roommate Yash, who are living the sort of collegiate intellectual life she's craving, she leans in.  She's given the nickname of Jordan.  She falls in love. She studies and works hard and slowly grows up.  Life teaches hard lessons, though, and one of them is learning what we can and cannot control.

I sank right into this study of learning and love and complicated friendships.  Sometimes our narrator (we really don't even know her real name until the end!) is frustrating but in the way that all college students can be frustrating as they figure themselves out and want so much to be grown up but are in some ways still making such painfully short sighted decisions.   It made me feel a LOT, especially the last third of the book.  SO many feelings about life and love and parenthood and the love of our youth that never really leaves us.  I was surprised by how strong my feelings were and I loved this book for that, for making me yearn and grieve and feel truly invested in a story.