Jincy Willett's writing is exquisite. She must be having a love affair with the English language because as a reader, I truly get the sense she loves how using words in certain ways can make a standard sentence seem so twisted, funny, heart-breaking or harsh.

In "The Writing Class," we meet Amy Gallup, who was once a talented writer and is now teaching a fiction writing seminar at the local community college. The story begins at the start of her latest workshop and immediately we're pulled into the learning process as well as given a glimpse into the mind of a teacher who is over it all. The classes are interesting on their own, but when a student begins to terrorize their classmates, things become even more interesting.

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 loved this book and ended up really liking some of the characters. Unique, original, funny, many good characters, and small lessons on writing. I really enjoyed the class members' creative writing "excerpts". ( )

http://hollybooknotes.blogspot.com/20... ( )

Amy Gallup teaches an adult writing class as a university extension. It is a fiction workshop and they will meet weekly for 9 weeks. From the start Amy has problems. She doesn't really enjoy starting off with a new group of people, and there are 15 names on her list, and 16 people in the room. Carla, the one person who has attended one of her classes before, is missing on the first night. When Amy gets home on the night of the first class, a heavy breather has left whispered fragments on her answering machine.

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. ( )

A very interesting thing happened when I was reading this book. It hasn’t happened before. Several times throughout, I would think to myself, why am I reading this? It was entertaining enough, but I didn’t think I was really invested enough to continue. I would put it down and walk away for a while. I usually have several books on the go, but when I would sit down and debate what to read next, none of them appealed to me, and I always ended up back at this book. There was such a diverse cast of characters, that by about half way through, I wanted to finish, just to see who done it (although, I’m not sure I WANTED it to be any of them). At the same time, I couldn’t be bothered to read any more, I couldn’t read anything else. Intriguing is the word that comes to mind that is appropriate. Has this every happened to anyone else?

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. ( )