Anyone who actually teaches English in high school or... well, actually teaches, will hate this book. Anyone who's actually ever struggled to have a book published will hate this book.

Basically, anyone who has encountered real struggle in life and has not had it resolved with the equivalent of a bunch of third act Deus ex machina-like events will hate this book.

The thing I found the most disturbing was the protagonist herself. She was, at heart, a narcissist.

The most character revealing moment in the novel comes when the protag, Casey, must give a speech at a school's writer's festival. She has three novelists waiting to be introduced, and she is meant to give the opening remarks. Anyone who has been in this position knows that your responsibility is to speak about the other novelists, make them look good, get the students interested in their work. Teachers know, your role is to sacrifice the white bull of your own desires for the sake of your students. What does our protagonist do? She spends the whole time talking about herself, her journey, her struggles with the loss of her mother, and what this means for writing.

This is supposed to be the third-act moment of anagnorisis - our hero coming into being as herself. It comes across as one of those cringey moments in bad romance films when the protag divulges everything about herself in front of a crowd of strangers.

If I were in the audience listening to this, I'd be thinking, "This isn't about you. Get over yourself."

Another revealing moment-- the author walks into 9th grade class as a first time teacher and has them in the palm of her hand by the end of the hour. (Imagine now the eye-roll of any teacher who has ever walked into a 9th grade classroom on their first day).

The author does a good job trying to hide the fundamental narcissism at the heart of this book by using the death of a parent as an excuse; King excuses her protag's narcissism by throwing real problems in front of her-- but as any good actor trained in Practical Aesthetics knows, character isn't drawn from the goal and it's obstacles. Character comes from how a person goes about overcoming the obstacles. In this case, all the protag's obstacles are resolved external to her. She's given a job she doesn't deserve; and let's not talk about her journey as a new writer, and how little she has to fight for it. We're supposed to care because she whines throughout the book about how hard it's been with her first novel. I did care at the beginning, because her struggles are every writer's struggles--of self-doubt and self-pity. Writers are a pathetic lot, but they make up for it by being resilient in the face of failure. How much real failure does this particular writer actually face? 0. Zilch. Nada.

It would take me a book to go on about how much I hated her depiction of the men in her life. They are all just foils for the protag's journey.

The thing is, the unlikeability of the protag isn't her fault. It's the author's. King doesn't give Casey a chance to overcome any real problems. She's victim to external factors in her life and the solutions all come external to her. It's like King doesn't know what it's like to sacrifice emotionally to overcome a problem, like she doesn't know what it means to change, fundamentally, as a person.

This didn't belong in the fiction section of the bookstore. It belonged in Fantasy, because none of this felt connected to anything real.

I feel like I need to go read some Atwood, Munro, Lessing, Woolf to wash the bad taste this novel has left in my mouth.