Review: The Life List

The Life List The Life List by Lori Nelson Spielman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read the first half by paperback and the second by audiobook. I don't recommend the audiobook version; the narrator has a stilted and uneven cadence that made the novel sound less well written than it was.

The book WAS pretty well written. It wasn't my style of novel, I was asked to read it by a friend. It was like watching a lifetime movie, or a live-action Disney movie, where people keep telling the princess that she can't always get everything she wants, but she clearly is. I'm usually happy to have a character second guess themselves, but she dives between extreme self-doubt and this unwavering faith in her death mother that the mother is painted to be as omnipotent as a god. The mother might actually BE an analogy for God, and the Life List an analogy for the Ten Commandments. If you told me right now "that was the exact point" I would believe you.

The message of the book is a good one: it's never too late to be happy. You shouldn't settle for being unhappy because you think you can't be / don't deserve to be / being happy is too hard. I like the oddball method of moving the story along... the Life List. I even like the character basically trying to convince herself that each man is the one she's supposed to be with, as painful as it is to read, because I think people really do that.

It's not a waste of paper, and hopefully inspires some people. I appreciate it for what it is, but wish I'd taken it out of the library instead of buying it. I'll be donating it to the Little Library.

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