L. T. SmithCritiques

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.

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! :)

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. :)

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."

See Right Through Me is perhaps the most oddly sweet, vulnerable and romantic lesbian fiction I think I have ever been lucky enough to read. It's lovely (boy, is it!) largely because, like other gifted novelists in her genre, L.T. Smith knows being gay is about far more than sex, and that knowledge is an inherent, beautiful, beautiful part of See Right Through Me, where two slightly broken women slowly, but surely fall in love way before they ever fall into bed.

There is so much reality in the trials and tribulations of Gemma and Maria's relationship: from the painfully awkward (and, believe me, they _are_ painfully awkward) moments of disbelief on each woman's part (that the other one could actually like her) to the amazingly tender and touching love scenes that make the ones in almost every other lesfic title seem biologically detached or just plain crass.

Though Gemma (or, as Maria lovingly calls her, "Gem") may frequently meander off on goofy tangents and philosophize just a tad too much sometimes, it's somehow very endearing and often wise. A lot of lines in See Right Through Me I just had to jot down:

"Time always lasts longer when you're breaking apart, doesn't it?" (That's for sure!)

"What's the point in dissecting stupidity?" (I know, right?)

"It's okay to fight for the one you love, but when she doesn't love you back-when she loves someone else-isn't that the time to let go and let her live her life?" (This applies to the novel's unofficial villain, who just doesn't know when to let go, but it's still great advice, don't you think?)

Gemma's self-doubt and clumsiness could be a turn-off in a less capable writer's hands, but L.T. Smith makes her weaknesses somehow lovable and how can you possibly find fault with a woman who says to her audience (I love it when narrators talk to their readers!): "I didn't mind waiting; I would wait for her as long as she wanted me to...I knew from the very pit of my stomach that this woman was the one I had been waiting for my whole life."

Maybe it's the sappy romantic in me, but this is the kind of stuff that makes for a good, sincere and sigh-inducing love story. My only complaint about See Right Through Me is the one any of us have whenever we finish a really, really good book: how can the next one we pick up and read possibly compare? :)

"Every time I saw her, I wanted to keep seeing her. I wanted to keep talking to her about anything and everything, wanted to reach out and touch her for any reason. Just the feel of her arm under my hand was enough to ease my craving for another day. But I wanted more. I needed more. I wanted her to feel the same way."--Forget Me Not, L.T. Smith


I honestly don't know how to do Forget Me Not justice. Not only is it so beautifully written and emotionally deep I struggle for words to capture it all adequately, the story's voice is so personal, so openly vulnerable I felt almost as I should look away while reading.

It takes a brave and very talented writer to handle such painful and delicate topics as Alzheimer's and romantic love, especially one who puts them in the same story. But it's precisely because main character Cathy Turner has faced so much, been such a good daughter, never once thinking of herself, that she deserves to find the happiness that has been shut out of her life for so long.

L.T. Smith doesn't just understand what true love is, she understands how much wanting to find it with someone else is a physical ache, not of the body, but of the heart and the soul. She understands the self-doubting, hurting woman who, even though she thinks she doesn't deserve it, most definitely does deserve love.

Her writing is lovely, endearing and real and that's not just rare in lesbian fiction, it's rare in fiction, period. Her trademark charming humor ("I could only hope that 'bedraggled' had become chic.") is here, but it's quieter and infused with the sadness that comes from grief and seeing a loved one go through something no one should ever have to face.

The kind of writer who creates women you wish you could meet in real life is a writer whose next titles you breathlessly await.

An incredibly sincere and often sweet read, _Once_ is definitely good and definitely worth reading, though L.T. Smith's _See Right Through Me_ remains my absolute favorite of hers. Lovable and very endearing and adorable Dudley (a dog who will just melt your soul) is my favorite character in this touching book whose cover truly matches its spirit and heart.

Normally, I love that almost all of L.T. Smith's novels share a common theme in how insecure two people can be about each other's feelings when they are first getting to know each other. I really, really get self doubt so it would seem perfectly natural to me that two people could actually like each other and yet have no clue about it or any confidence in their own appeal. This motif in Ms. Smith's fiction is a big reason why I love her books so much.

But with _Once_ I became physically exhausted by it all, at times. It's not the writer's fault at all...if anything, this time around she's captured the pain of self doubt better than ever before, along with an underlying darkness and deep sadness to both women's relationship histories.

I also found myself very, very troubled by an early scene in the novel where the main character punches her ex very, very hard in the face. It made painfully lovely passages lose some of their power because Beth really is not all that likable at times: "It wasn’t that I didn’t believe that Amy was the person I wanted to be with; it was more a case of not being able to trust that anyone would want to be with me. Like Groucho Marx said, he didn’t want to be a member of any club that would accept him as a member."

Perhaps I am being a bit overly sensitive to this part and the main character does believe her ex has been abusing her dog when she punches her. The thing is she does not know for sure her ex hurt her dog and when she realizes later she did not there is no real remorse on her part and that just disturbs me so very much.

L.T. Smith's Driving Me Mad is not only unique and complex in plot, it offers characters you care about a lot and would not mind knowing in real life. This is right up there with her terrific and very endearing novel, See Right Through Me. And though the mystery itself pulls you in immediately and is "on the edge of your seat" compelling, it is the emotions and the vulnerability swirling throughout, so open and wonderfully, that are deeply affecting and have lingered with me long after finishing. Who among us, after all, has not felt this way as we struggle with our hearts and the feelings within them?:

"Did it bother me? Did I want to run away screaming into the hills? Yes and no. Yes, because I had never allowed anyone to get that close to me before. I had never let guard down long enough for anyone to see the real me, quivering in fear. I was scared that when Clare could see who I actually was, she wouldn’t be interested in someone like me."

No one is immune to heartache and L.T. Smith is such a gifted writer because she can so beautifully capture on page the very things we secretly feel but are not always willing or able to express ourselves. It felt like forever for Driving Me Mad to be released and the wait is well, well worth it!!