Life's Too Short - I have way too many thoughts..

Author: Abby Jimenez

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ (3.25)

Genres: Romance, women's fiction, contemporary

Trigger/CW warnings for Life's Too Short: ALS, mental health (OCD/hoarding), parental abandonment, addiction, grief and loss (Quoted from the author!)

I am not an own voices reviewer, so I don't know how accurate the depictions of ALS are in the book.

Vanessa Price is a travel YouTuber who started her channel because life's too short, and she wanted to see the world. She comes from a family with a history of ALS and started her channel to help fund ALS research and show her travel adventures. That was until she started fostering her half-sister's infant daughter.

Adrian Copeland is a criminal defense lawyer who is her next door neighbor. They meet and things progress from there...

Similar with her previous books, I think the author is really good at hooking you right from the start and making you want to continue reading, but towards the end it always gets a bit complicated.. I really love the main characters' professions, one a YouTuber and one a criminal defense defense lawyer, however I felt like we barely got to read about Adrian's career and the focus was mainly on Vanessa, which was a pity because his career is so interesting! I also saw other reviews saying how the baby felt more like a prop than anything because the baby was what created the opportunity for them to meet (because she was crying) but then the baby became a completely agreeable and easy baby for the rest of the book. I do agree with that, and it also makes me feel like Adrian's profession was also more a prop than anything else as well.

This didn't feel much like a romance but more like a women's fiction contemporary because we learn about ALS and how Vanessa's family members deal with this results in other forms of mental health illnesses too.

This book is complicated because I keep switching between liking and disliking Vanessa, which affects how I view her chemistry with Adrian. At times I think she's a quirky character but then at times when she interacts with her family members or even Adrian during the conflict at the end she does things that make me think she is quite entitled because she might have ALS or because she provides for the family.. Whether this means that her character is fleshed out to have such different sides to her or whether this means her character is contradictory I'm not sure...

While trying to remain as spoiler-free as possible, I feel like the conflict was so... weird? How realistic was the probability of that happening? And the resolution was just... super dramatic and cheesy and then the continuation of the conflict resolution in the epilogue was weirder and even more anti-climatic? Again, this makes me think this book is at parts overly dramatic, celebrity-influencer vibes and at parts next-door neighbor vibes, which is so confusing...

I still wanted to keep reading (although towards the end I was getting impatient), and they are still cute, but the overall confusion made me give it 3.25 stars.