Live For Today by Carol Lynne

There are two things that I just don't like in my fiction: lots of crying (by men or women) and the unironic use of the word "lover". Live for Today has lots of both.

Unfortunately, I feel like that's only where the books problems start. (Mildly spoilery below the cut)

But first, a disclaimer: Live for Today is actually part of a series. It is, in fact, the final 'book' in the series. From what I've gleaned, the protagonists, Luc and Justin are only the main couple in the very first book, but it seemed like they were in the background of many or all of the rest. However, I didn't read any of the previous books in the series and so all my reactions to it are based on it as a standalone story. Reading the previous installments may have changed some of my perceptions about the book, but they wouldn't have changed them all.

First is the most obvious: I think Lynne could have given a better nod to potential new readers. Though it wasn't terribly hard to piece together the relationship between Justin and Luc, the other relationships between peripheral characters was left a lot more opaque, giving the feeling of being invited to a party where everyone already knows each other and you don't know anyone.

As I said above, this is the last book of a series of 12 books, so I both understand why this is so and I understood what I was getting in to, coming to the series so late (though I thought they were less interconnected than they apparently are), but it would've been nice if Lynne could have given a new reader a greater in.

2. The problem with stories where the couple starts out in (romantic) trouble, is that you run the risk of losing your audience before you ever get to the make-up sex. Couples in trouble are usually couples at their worst, bitter, defensive, hurting each other for the sake of hurting each other… If this is the state from which you introduce your protagonists, if this is your reader's first impression of the putative heroes, there's a high risk of your reader coming to dislike your characters for being assholes and jerks before you get a chance to show their good side and the chemistry that brought them together in the first place.

Which was definitely the case here. Having no previous history with Justin or Luc, no view of them when their relationship worked, I found them both intensely unlikeable and felt no real investment in whether their relationship would founder or resolve.

Worse, I didn't think either character got any better or more likeable as the story went on. Though Justin had the 'excuse' of his medical condition, he still read very unsympathetically, alternating between screaming high drama and tearful high drama in a way that felt vaguely abusive. On the other hand, Luc (O, saintlike Luc) seemed clearly Lynne's favorite, putting stoically up with Justin's every tantrum and put-off, grateful only to have whatever scraps of attention Justin was willing to bestow on him. But I have no fondness for martyrs and I had no fondness for Luc. More than anything, I saw him as Justin's enabler, a feeling borne out by the fact that it took another character stepping in to make Justin get his head on straight.

3. Going back to a bigger picture, I feel like the scope of the story was way too big for the time and space Lynne devoted to it. 80-some pages just isn't long enough to do justice to a relationship in crisis, the long road to recovery created by Justin's medical crisis and creating a fitting end to the series. As a result, Lynne does a lot more telling than showing (which is generally less convincing), a lot of skimming over both physical time and Justin & Luc's emotions, and a lot of reliance on cliché storytelling to crutch the story along. Trying to compact such a big story into such a short form does story and reader a disservice and it showed. More than that, for a book whose title and blurb talked about "living for today" and Justin's recovery, I felt like not enough time was given over to that motif and plotline, glossed over shallowly in favor of...nothing in particular.


4. I'm just not a fan of Lynne's writing style. That's purely personal—and subjective—but there it is. Lynne writes men who cry in pretty much every scene. No, seriously. She's continually having Luc and Justin refer to each other as 'his lover', 'his partner', 'his man', 'the man that he loves' and I find it clumsy and off-putting. Just use names, ffs! More ephemerally, I feel like there's a lack of adultness in the portrayal of Justin and Luc. Everything between them is such high drama, all screaming or tears, life or death, flouncing away from each other in a high dudgeon, or begging tearily for forgiveness. Did I mention the crying? All the crying? Yeah. And then lastly, Lynne is one of those writers who peppers her sex scenes with verbs like "sawed" and "stabbed" and "howled", which I find extremely unsexy, so I didn't even have the smut to fall back on.

I do wonder how much of my opinion would change if I'd read the entire series, or at least the first book that detailed Luc and Justin's initial romance, but the quirks that turned me off Lynne's writing seem unlikely to improve by going back to earlier books. And given how much I didn't enjoy reading this, I'm just not willing to give it a try.