I picked up this book because I found the concept amusing: a burned out author who now gets by teaching creative writing extension courses has to solve a murder in her class.The Writing Class follows the conventions of a "Ten Little Indians"-style murder mystery. We're introduced to an entire class of writer wannabes, and then we spend the book trying, along with the main character, to guess who the killer is. Jincy Willett is funny in a sharp and satirical but humane way, and she has a real gif...

This was a perfect choice for an airplane book, especially since we (stupidly) flew fucking Airtran, which doesn't even show movies! WTF? But so I was finished with this before we even got to our layover. What to say...? I like Jincy a whole lot, and I liked this too, but it wasn't remotely as good as Winner of the National Book Award. (Also, side note, Jincy? Your titles blow.) This is the story of a woman who teaches a writing class for grownups at a local college somewhere in California. She'...

I found this book to be funny, provocative, and above all, intelligent. My sense is that Willett's wisdom has been hard-earned, yet she shares it generously. I'm not a writer, and I've never attended workshops such as those so precisely evoked in this novel, but as a teacher of English, I recognize what Willett so clearly describes: the many nuances of the relationship between a well-intended, ambitious class and an equally responsible instructor. Many of us who read compulsively, hopefully, con...

I put off reading the last 40 pages to try to give myself more time to imagine possible outcomes for this one... This is a total treat! Funny, smart, dark, and surprising.

I loved Jincy Willet’s hilarious second book about aging novelist and writing instructor Amy Gallup so much that I doubled back to read this first one. While this has the same main character and I enjoyed it a lot, The Writing Class is very different from its sequel and I liked the second book more. Amy Falls Down is absurd, funny, insightful, and moving, and while The Writing class has all of those qualities they aren’t as strong and it’s first and foremost a mystery--an element that is not par...

I completely enjoyed this book. The characters were wonderful and eccentric. It was so comedic yet with a scary murderer bit. I loved the many writing tips stealthily inserted into the dialogue. Then, there was the subtle way the effects of isolation and loneliness were described and overcome. I recommend the book without reservations.

All at once this novel is funny, clever, sad, thrilling, and readable. And in between all of the lovely bits of story, there are some nearly profound thoughts on writers and writing, on art vs. not art, on loneliness and on happiness and what it means to be either or both. And, of course, the humor--the wit--is constantly surprising, appearing in places you'd never expect it if you've never read Jincy Willett before. Sure, the identity of the killer didn't come as a huge shock to me--I'd guessed...

A fun read. Maybe not the best as a mystery, but an engaging premise. Amy, an author who years before had been called promising, teaches an adult writing class. With each session, though, progressively bad things happen. They know that one of their own classmates is the culprit. So, invoking the standard catchphrase, whodunit? We’re supposed to figure it out from the students’ writing assignments. The recognizable archetypes are part of the fun: the fan of the hard-boiled detective novel, the se...

Yesterday, I noticed this book was due today and someone had put a hold on it. (The hold wasn't there last week!) So after dinner, I cracked it to see if it were worth keeping/putting back on the list. I finished it this morning, and didn't get a lot of sleep in the meantime (except for the fifteen-minute nap on the couch between 5th and 6th class chapters. It involved drool, and I won't say more than that). What a fun read! Interesting and endearing characters, fascinating weirdness but also to...

Lots of things I liked, some things I didn't. Likes:- The writing advice- It takes place in San Diego. Yeah San Diego! Wooo!- It's a murder mystery with a creative writing class as a setting and the students as suspects.- Author Jincy Willett is hilarious. - Figuring out whodunnit requires analysis of the students' writing samples.- Edna's story. I wanted it to be an actual novel.- The circumstances of Amy's first marriage- Carla's horrible mother and the pizza delivery prank- Dot. Every creativ...

I was moved to add this to my to-read list by this fabulous review. Admittedly, the set-up is one that would have appealed to me even without the review, but without the review (a) I wouldn't have found the book and (b) I wouldn't have known just how well the author carries it off. Looking forward to reading it.--Okay, so now I've read it. I enjoyed it a lot--it was a good, easy, fun read--but I didn't have the overwhelmingly positive feeling for it that David did. I liked best the actual writin...

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

Most of us have attended a continuing ed. class; few have imagined it from the viewpoint of the teacher. There is the nervous headcount (high enough to meet the registrar's quorum?). There is the awkward roll-call of tongue-twisting names. There are first impressions prompted by age, clothing, and mannerisms (stereotyping, certainly, but open to revision as the term progresses). Reading preferences? (Please, not the default triumvirate of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Updike!) Motivations are divers...

There was a lot to like about this book. Jincy Willett is a sharp, witty (and a bit bitter) writer who it's just plain fun to hang around with, and there were many wonderful lines and paragraphs that I just had to read aloud to Jim. I also loved the concept (an extension school writing class -- one of the writers starts killing off the others)The problem, however, and a big one, was with the murder mystery. Jincy Willett had absolutely no idea how to do that well; it was obvious that she was mor...

I picked up The Writing Class after reading Jincy's story "The Best of Betty" in the David Sedalia-edited collection Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. "Betty" is a great story: a tragi-comic arc full of wit, pain, sadness, and humor. "Who is Jincy Willett?" I asked myself. Looking her up, I noticed The Writing Class, a book I'd noticed at the bookstore but never read. I should have. This book is the perfect fit for me right now.Amy Gallup is a failed writer. Well, that's how she sees...

At a time when I was already in the middle of several other books (just as I am right now), the bookstore where I work got a shipment of new books in, and this one looked fascinating to me. I dropped everything else I was reading in order to blow through this book in about three days, and I never regretted it for a second. At first glance, "The Writing Class" might seem like a standard cozy mystery, one structured in a similar manner to the endless craft mysteries pumped out by Berkeley Prime Cr...

I loved this book! Laugh out loud funny while managing to balance a muder mystery suspense? That's talent.I found the main character of Amy, while neurotic and with enough insecurities to fill a house, a totally lovable woman. Her inner dialogues were hilarious. Then there's the idea of a murder mystery centered around a college extension writer's workshop within which lurks an angry, rejected-author-turned-psychotic-murderer seeking to mete out some type of twisted justice for all the wrongs (r...

This book opened with so much promise--I was loving it, laughing aloud nearly every other page!--but it petered out for me towards the middle. Having taken many writing workshops, I loved the set-up of the novel (there's almost always writing in any writing class that spawns laughter); I also found Amy's website so funny it gave me side stitches. And I liked Amy, not to mention loved her back story--it comes out at the end and is very powerful, yet by that point I was no longer invested in the c...

I'm sure this review will be helpful to no one, but I'll write it anyway. As an English/Literature nerd I really enjoyed this book. The main character is a bitter, overweight, reclusive writer that hasn't written anything in years. She teaches a writing class in the evening. As the class progresses, students start receiving threats in the form of letters, pranks, and pictures. The instructor, Amy, also starts getting threatening letters and phone calls. She knows the culprit is someone in the cl...

This was my second Jincy Willett novel and I'm officially a fan.