Sometimes, late at night, in the dark, she laughs inappropriately.’ I found Amy anything but unpleasant. She describes herself on her blog, Go Away, as ‘an aging, bitter, unpleasant woman … who spends her days editing unreadable text and her nights teaching and not writing. She found success as a writer at a young age, publishing 4 novels before losing her muse more than 20 years ago. She is a wonderful character, a loner who is afraid to be alone. With 13 students in the class, this book has a large cast of characters, and Willett has done an excellent job of making each of them come alive as distinctive personalities. Everyone decides to continue with the classes, aware that the murderer is one of them, and try to find a way to discover his or her identity. But things escalate when one of the students ends up dead.Īmy, concerned for the rest of her class, decides to tell them all what has been going on. It starts when Amy receives a nasty phone call, then one of her students is sent a spiteful parody of a poem she read out in class, and others receive a vicious peer evaluation and a crude drawing. Unfortunately a malicious prankster, dubbed the Sniper, looks like spoiling it all. But this class looks like being a particularly good group, everyone seems to be working well together, producing some lively in-class discussion. Her class this term has all the usual types, the overly enthusiastic student, the undiscovered talent, the slacker, the politically correct, the lonely. Her only contact with people is the weekly adult education fiction writing class she teaches.

First line: Lumbers into class five minutes late, dragging, along with her yard-wide butt, a beat-up vinyl briefcase stuffed with old notebooks.Īmy Gallup, is overweight, middle-aged and since the death of her first husband and the failure of her second marriage, has lived the life of a recluse with only her basset hound, Alphonse for company.

The Writing Class by Jincy Willett