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| from moviefanatic.com |
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."
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