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Fiction. Literature. Mystery. Humor (Fiction.) HTML: Amy Gallup is gifted, perhaps too gifted for her own good. Published at only twenty-two, she peaked early and found critical but not commercial success. Now her former life is gone, along with her writing career and beloved husband. A reclusive widow, her sole companion a dour, flatulent basset hound who barely tolerates her, her daily mantra Kill Me Now, she is a loner afraid to be alone. Her only bright spot each week is the writing class that she teaches at the university extension. This semester's class is full of the usual suspects: the doctor who wants to be the next Robin Cook, the overly enthusiastic repeat student, the slacker, the unassuming student with the hidden talent, the prankster, the know-it-all.... Amy's seen them all before. But something is very different about this class�-and the clues begin with a scary phone call in the middle of the night and obscene threats instead of peer evaluations on student writing assignments. Amy soon realizes that one of her students is a very sick puppy, and when a member of the class is murdered, everyone becomes a suspect. As she dissects each student's writing for clues, Amy must enlist the help of everyone in her class, including the murderer, to find the killer among them. Suspenseful, extremely witty, brilliantly written, unexpectedly hilarious, and a joy from start to finish, The Writing Class is a one-of-a-kind novel that rivals Jincy Willett's previous masterpieces..… (more)
User reviews
This didn't seem to me to be a mystery in the sense I normally think of them, because I'm not sure there's really a series of clues the reader can use to figure out who the killer is. You can guess, sure, but there didn't seem to be anything that really said, even subtly, "the killer is definitely _____." And that's not a bad thing because, again, the charm of the book isn't in the mystery. It's in the characters and the wit that comes through in the prose. That's what makes this book fun.
Furthermore, at one point in the book a member of the "writing class" complains about mystery authors misleading readers on purpose, the joke here is that this is exactly what Willett does throughout the entire book!
Lame ending, lame mystery, lame characters.
In "The Writing Class," we meet Amy
Eventually, there is a murder and the students rally together to support their teacher and new friends while at the same time, begin to doubt one-another and begin to suspect the worst in some of their fellow classmates.
I'll admit that the murder was of secondary interest to me. I was more engaged by Amy's story and her interactions with her students. The murder added a little extra intensity to the story and gave the plot a dash of mystery (the killer was indeed a surprise!), but it was the way the students responded to it that had me reading more. My only issue with the book was that I felt it did drag a little towards the end, but other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I did like the humor, but found it very literary, for a mystery, and sometimes that was distracting. I could relate in some ways to the main character, who wanted to be alone in her house with her books and her dog, but then other things I found so far fetched. Why was she always being talked in to things? Why did she keep coming back? Why did she set herself up for some of the scenarios to happen? The book was set up to alternate back and forth between her life, and the class. I love that in the chapters that were set in the classroom setting she shared snippets of the writing of her students. They ranged from really good to really bad, and every genre you could imagine. It added another depth to the story I wouldn’t expect. Although it could be seen as distracting, or irrelevant, I thought it told us quite a bit about the characters that wrote them. Am I pleased that I finished? Yes, there was pay off at the end. Would I go out hunting more of the same? Probably not.
By the third class it is obvious there is someone in the class who isn't quite what they seem. As the class continues, this person, identity still unknown, selects victims with cruel comments on their manuscripts, and practical jokes. And then one of the class dies.
It is obvious that Jincy Willett has brought considerable experience in conducting writing classes to the writing of this book, with keen observations, and realistic scenarios. It reminded me quite a lot of classes I attended a couple of years ago, although Amy was much more demanding of her students than my teacher was.
However for me, the book became a little long. I desperately wanted to get on and hunt down The Sniper, the perpetrator of all the nasty deeds, including by the end more than one murder. And from that standpoint the last hundred pages just didn't move fast enough. It felt like Jincy Willett had a lot of material she wanted to include, and we were going to get it whether we liked it or not. I became increasingly annoyed by the fact that I felt there weren't enough hints about who the villain was.
Bernadette in Reactions to Reading says " I’m not sure this book is really crime fiction" and I am inclined to agree with her. I think the crime elements take a back seat to the other things that Willett is writing about. But Bernadette obviously enjoyed it.
This book will be a real treat for all fiction lovers, writers, and wannabe writers. The Writing Class manages to combine
In the novel, reclusive eccentric Amy Gallup teaches an extension fiction writing class at the local college. At first, Amy is pleasantly surprised by the high potential exhibited by this semester’s group of students. However, her dream class soon turns into a nightmare when one of the students starts playing malevolent pranks on both Amy and on the other students. The pranks eventually escalate to murder and Amy must use everything at her disposal to try and nab the killer amongst the group. The resource with the most potential is the student’s writing and Amy examines each student’s prose for the clues.
Anyone who has participated in a writing workshop (or for that matter, in any small collegiate class) will be able to relate to the class dynamic portrayed in this novel. As is almost always the case in these courses, the class is comprised of the know-it-all, the slacker, the pretty girl, the class clown, etc. The characters are maddening, amusing, and creepy and all of the other adjectives one can remember people in school being. Ms. Willett’s descriptive talents are truly frightening (pun intended)!
Although, Amy Gallup (the workshop teacher), would admonish me for my use of cliché, I can’t help but describe this novel as a “real page turner!”
I nearly didn’t read this book because when I got it home from the library I discovered that one of the prominently placed pull quotes on the cover was something gushing by David Sedaris. I am, apparently, the only person on the planet who doesn’t find Sedaris’ own writing amusing and assumed that if he liked it I would not. As I had dragged it all the way home I set out, albeit with low expectations, and happily, enjoyed it spite of myself (and Sedaris) and vowed, once again, to wage a campaign to rid the world of publicity blurbs on books because they do more harm than good.
The characters are terrific. Amy is a loner afraid of being alone, a writer with the misfortune of having had her first book published and has a dozen more quirks. Often I find fictional people with loads of oddities to be unbelievable but I didn’t experience that with Amy. Her foibles and peculiar behaviours were all explained naturally and I not only found her credible but I liked her. A lot. She’s witty, self-deprecating but not depressingly so and clever. Her students fulfil more stereotypical roles but as that is partially their purpose it doesn’t detract from the story and they do manage to surprise on occasion. I was thoroughly enthralled by the depiction of the shifting group dynamics and the development of the characters, much of which is done via their writing and the critique of it. Of course as Amy delivers her mini lectures about what makes good (and bad) writing I was applying that information to what I was reading and, for the most part, found Willett had taken her own character’s advice.
Structurally the book tries several different things and most of them work. The backbone consists of chapters for each class and these include snippets of each student’s writing which are discussed and dissected. In between there are chapters told from Amy’s point of view, extracts from Amy’s blog and diary entries from The Sniper. This could have been confusing but Willett has done a good job of pulling all these elements together to form a narrative. There is one part, a mystery play that one of the students has written that is acted out by the other students, that I failed to see the point of and found incongruous with the rest of the story but it wasn’t jarring enough to detract too much.
In pure mystery terms the plot is less successful than the character development and structure. The police show no interest in any of the nastier events that take place which is not terribly credible and the traditional whodunit with an ever decreasing pool of suspects isn’t done all that well. There’s never more than a vague suspicious shadow cast over any one person and when the villain was finally revealed there wasn’t a huge amount tying them back to an intricately woven trail of evidence. However I really didn’t care about this too much as I was enjoying the non-mystery elements of the story and all the rest the book had to offer.
So I’m not sure this book is really crime fiction although as I seem to be saying that rather a lot lately maybe I just don’t understand the term anymore. Still, I can imagine recommending this to people I know who don’t like reading traditional crime fiction and wouldn’t suggest it for hard core mystery lovers at all. There were aspects of a decent ‘chic-lit’ (I hate that term) title such as Jane Green’s The Beach House but it also reminded me of Ben Elton’s Dead Famous in the way it cleverly deals with archetypes and applies a liberal does of satire to events. Whatever genre it might be I found it a thoroughly entertaining and witty book.
I'm not sure I will be able to return to a writing
I can only hope that my mystery, when I finally finish it, is as well written, engaging, and true to life as this book. Loved it. -KK
I read this after being (mostly) stood up for a first "date" with the members of my nascent writing group. I sat in the bookstore and ate
Perhaps reading about murderous writers isn't the best thing for me right now.
I don't know what this bloke reads that this book doesn't even register on my radar for funny novels.
Dull? Yes;
Dreary? Yes;
Longwinded? Yes;
Shallow characters? Yes;
Do you have any investment in who the killer is? Not at all.
I was
Well, I tried. I basically have nothing positive to day about the book beyond it being a unique, albeit poorly executed, concept.
That's just one of the things about the novel that don't
Amy Gallup is a novelist, or former novelist, whose books are out of print and whose literary career, like her personal life, lies in ruins. To support herself and her dog, she teaches a writing class for adults, most of whom have little or no talent but who pay the fees, so they're in. Just wanting to be a writer is good enough for Amy. That's more ambition than she has anymore.
Even early on it is clear some member of her new class has a screw loose. Ominous phone messages, notes, etc., keep appearing as the weeks go on. Then one class member is found dead, then another. The police don't take it seriously. (Since Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, police incompetence has been more rule than exception in murder mysteries.) Since her class refuses to disband (and she needs the money), Amy realizes it is up to her to find the Sniper, as the killer is dubbed.
"The Writing Class," sometimes interesting and sometimes not, doesn't earn an A, but it is good enough to make you glad you kept coming back for more.
The Writing Class opens on the first day of an evening extension creative writing class and sets a dark comedic tone as it introduces each of the thirteen students -- all adults in varying stages of life and career. The novel is told from the point of view of the instructor, Amy Gallup -- an author who had early novel-writing successes, but in recent years has holed herself up in her house and not let writing or people get too close. An anonymous prankster among the students starts preying on Amy and the other students, until finally one of them is found dead under mysterious circumstances and writing must take the backseat to solving the mystery. The dead-on descriptions of the highs and lows of writing workshops mixed with a page-turning mystery felt like a breath of fresh air into my, as of late, stale reading life. I dare even Lynn Freed to keep herself from laughing while reading this book. Then again, the book might fill her with regrets over missed opportunities to murder those of us dabblers and hacks who irritated her the most.