L. T. Smith

Ok, I've got a big soft spot for this book. I also know that lots of other folks would be driven mad by the author's voice and the language but I can't help but love this book. There's plenty of angst and sex, which I sometimes am in the mood for. This book is definitely one of my guilty pleasures, even though I want to shake the hell out of the main character. But that's how angsty romance novels are, right?

There are some typos and some words that didn't get removed in the editing process so I had to take off a bit in my rating for that.

… (mehr)

I am pretty much smitten with Beginnings. Ash is one of the most appealing, all-around likable and caring characters I've encountered in a novel in ages. It's easy to see why Lou adores her, though Lou herself, with her bursts of anger and fits of jealousy as an adult, tries my patience at times.

As with her other tales, L.T. Smith captures the pain and awkwardness of insecurity like no one else does. Meshing such intense self-doubt with such a pure love that seems destined from the day the two young girls meet makes all that insecurity much more believable...after all, those of us who question our worth the most are bound to feel we don't deserve the very love we most crave.

Perhaps because there is a lot of pain in here I can relate to I didn't laugh as much as I did when I read L.T. Smith's simply amazing See Right Through Me. There are definitely moments where you laugh, but your heart ends up aching more than your stomach does.

Even so, Beginnings is breathtaking when it comes to emotions. The reader is there with Lou as she struggles through childhood, her teens and then life as an adult. She may not always be the most composed or even mature, but she is very real. This line, for instance, is all too familiar:

"I flirt, I am a flirt, but the kind that is shocked when flirting actually works. The kind that when a woman smiles at me in an empty room, I still look over my shoulder just to make sure she’s smiling at me, then look back over it a second time."

Oddly enough (or maybe not, if you have ever been in Lou's shoes) it's the first half of the novel that has most lingered with me. Young Lou is someone your heart just breaks for as she agonizes over her own appeal, what it's like to be in love with someone you shouldn't (or think you shouldn't) and how on earth she's going to move on after losing the best friend she has ever known.

Another constant for Lou (that helps me sympathize with her even when she's a bit maddening) is how she battles her own emotions and longs to master them in certain situations, especially when it comes to Ash, whom she is convinced would "freak" if she knew about her love.

"There was no way I could have done that. I just had to tighten the reins on my feelings, be more careful with what I let show. I would have to learn how to do that. And quickly. But I know for definite—in that split second she held my gaze, she must have seen everything I had tried so hard to keep hidden."

I absolutely love how Beginnings comes full circle, the pop culture references that you might remember from your own childhood, the writing itself and how you can just fall into this story as if it is actually real life. As always when I finish anything by L.T. Smith, I hope there's more around the corner soon! :)… (mehr)

There’s only ever one bad thing about a book by L.T. Smith and that is this: it has to end and the reader must return to reality. But no matter how bad it is that the journey has to end, the good makes it all worth it.

Funny, sweet, smart, beautiful and sigh-inducing, Hearts and Flowers Border comes with its own wonderful interior monologue and may be even more touching and hysterical than See Right Through Me.

L.T. Smith's way with words is what I love most about her novels. They ring true because they are true and they comfort because they are universal thoughts written so uniquely.

When Laura first realizes she is beyond gone over her classmate Emma, she thinks to herself: "Yes, the plague. She was the plague. Emma plagued every thought I had...awake or asleep; she plagued my conscience and my heart. She was a disease; a disease I wouldn’t mind dying from. What an agonisingly beautiful way to die that would be."

She has never felt anything like this before and wonders why it's so affecting. Early on she can't explain why she feels so lonely having met her when she doesn't truly her. So much of what Laura thinks can hit close to home. Sometimes, it's only when we meet someone special we realize how lonely we've been. Their presence comes in so strongly that when they leave, it's almost heartache.

At the same time, that person can inspire us, make us want to be someone worthy of their attention and respect: “I was grieving, grieving for the chance to be someone else, someone else who I could be—someone different who wanted to be different.” Sometimes, it’s with the very people we like most, we mess up the worst. I love that Laura desperately wants to be a better person for both herself and Emma.

Insecurities and doubt can run wild in a L.T. Smith novel, but in Hearts and Flowers Border, it’s even more intense and more complex because there’s a teenage past to their current adult relationship, which makes everything all the more complicated, messy and angsty.

It also makes the novel much more real. Laura’s intensely strong anxieties about being loved back is all too realistic, painful to read at times and yet makes the story stand out. “Who was I kidding?," Laura thinks, always excruciatingly hard on herself, "Emma Jenkins would never go for someone like me, not in a million years. Get over yourself, Stewart. Get it into your thick skull.”

With Laura and Emma both battling their own inner demons, there's really no room or time for any other forces to mess with their love. The stress and the sadness are high at times, but so is the love: "I sighed. I felt like a mother watching over her child, both of us surrounded by the protection of daddy bear. Sickly sweet—I know, but hey—all through our lives, that is the one thing that we search for—the ultimate feeling of belonging."

Coming to the end of one L.T. Smith's books is always bittersweet, but that's why I'm a big believer in reading favorite books over and over. :)… (mehr)

Seeing L.T. Smith's newest novel released sooner than expected, I couldn't hit one click on Amazon fast enough. As I have with her previous novels, I got a bit giddy with how hilarious and deep down good Still Life is, both in style (the language is a character all its own) and story (a complex roller coaster of a ride, always pulling you in.)

No one gets the wonders of emotion and "does she or does she not like me?" like L.T. Smith does. And the vulnerability of her main characters is very touching and a huge bonus. They can also be adorable without being precious and their self-doubt rings so true it can be absolutely heart-breaking.

You want to quietly scream at Jess (the center of Still Life): "You're an idiot; can't you see she likes you?" Then you remember what it's like to think (even know) that you could never be liked back by that special someone...and, of course, there's the simple fact it's fiction (where chances are much higher unrequited love will turn out to be very much requited) and the reader is able to step back and see things differently than the characters do.

Besides the sweetness of it all, there's the uncomfortably relatable, where you feel like L.T. Smith knows exactly how you feel and you know immediately she just gets it, gets that horrible and beautiful jumbled mess of liking someone a lot:

"I wanted to not feel the way I did, wanted to not like Diana Sullivan as much as I did. I really wanted to hate her, even just dislike her intensely, but it wouldn't come....I felt as if I should fill the void, but I couldn't drag anything from the depths to help me out. I was nervous, apprehensive, expectant, yet not. The silence seemed to drag and drag, and I was as useful as a chocolate teapot. I wanted to blurt out that I liked her--just so she'd know. No strings."

"No strings." That part is my favorite. If only you could tell someone how you really feel, just say it once (and quickly), then that would be it. No strings, not a single one, would be attached.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed Still Life, though I would have loved the opportunity to have a geeky bookworm type (coke bottle glasses and all) be the object of someone's love and lust. There's a rather comedic moment in the beginning of Still Life when Jess Taylor thinks the voice that enchants her from the other side of the room belongs to a woman who looks exactly like Professor Sybil Trelawney from the Harry Potter movies.

Because of my own hang-ups about how looks are portrayed in books, film and even pop music, I actually felt a flicker of hope that finally a character in a romance novel is non-traditionally attractive and might actually have physical character to her face. Not only does she turn out to not be the woman with the wonderful voice, Jess is relieved to discover the voice belongs to Diana Sullivan, whom she refers to as "gorgeous" several times throughout the book.

But Diana, thanks to a writer who always sees beneath the surface of things, turns out to be far more than a pretty face and the reader gets a funny and delightfully endearing love story full of see-sawing emotions that give it a painful and poignant rawness. L.T. Smith's characters have a philosophy of love (*see below) that makes one sigh extra hard, which is absolutely everything you could want until you have to return to reality after finishing the last page.

*"If I had to choose between the erotically charged encounter we had shared the previous evening and the one I was now experiencing curled up on the chest of the woman I was falling for, I would have been hard pushed. Cuddling was delicious intoxicating, but in the most ethereal way imaginable. I believed I had waited all my life to experience that feeling. I was home. This being together was home. She was home. My home."… (mehr)