Life's Too Short

I cried. Even though I knew Vanessa couldn't possibly die because that would ruin the point of a romance novel.

So here's the deal, the women in her family have tended to get a genetically passed-down disease (ALS) that tends to claim them in a very short period of time. She watched her sister and her mother both die of this before age 30, with and without treatment attempts, and decided that she would experience everything she could, with the expectation that she likely wouldn't be around for the long-term. Which is then complicated when her half-sister Annabel drops her infant off at Vanessa's house and disappears.

That whole side of the family is REALLY damaged, from all the death and the unpredictability of this illness. There's a lot of unhealthy coping all around.

But then Adrian comes into the picture! He's like, all stability all the time. They become friends. But ONLY friends, because Vanessa doesn't want a relationship on the basis that she could be dead like any minute.

[Sure Jan gif]

I love that Abby Jimenez puts in the work to get her characters' jobs right. However. The baby, Grace. Other than in Vanessa and Adrian's meet-cute, having an infant doesn't seem to interfere with their lives like at ALL?? They're always feeding her and changing her and putting her in the swing or letting her sleep, but otherwise Grace sometimes felt like a Plot Device. Infants require other things too! Sometimes they scream for no reason! Sometimes they need tummy time and peekaboo and stories! I know this is a romance novel and therefore maybe the stuff happening with the baby didn't need to be on-page all the time, but I kept going, okay but where's Grace?

The issue here isn't one of lack of communication, but rather a misunderstanding based on communication that seems very reasonable to me. I wasn't mad at it at all.

The ending felt a little rushed. I could have done with more of Adrian's therapy/recovery from the shock of learning the extent of Vanessa's family history.

Overall, I really liked it, just not nearly as much as the other one I just read.

CW: fatal illness (anxiety over it, lack of treatment options, family members who have died of it), medical trauma, addiction and how the medical establishment treats addicts, anxiety/panic attacks, hoarding, mental illness, adoption, end 0f life preparation, abandonment, cheating (not by main characters)