Title: Live Through This
Author: Mindi Scott
Rating: ★★★

I don’t mind when all the loose ties aren’t wrapped up at the end of a novel. Not everything can be explained or taken care of. I do need the big loose ends to have some sort of conclusion though. I was enjoying Live Through This right up until the very end.

Coley has what looks to be the perfect life. Her family is a bit loud, and they get on each other’s nerves sometimes, but they look happy. She’s on the dance team and is great at it. She’s got the perfect friends-to-more relationship that people envy.

What people don’t see is how messed up her home life is, how her best friend no longer speaks to her, her dance team is filled with tension, and she has no idea how to try and take control as her life spins out from under her.

Coley and Reece started as friends, and as they start a more romantic relationship, the other strings of her life start to unwind. She doesn’t know how to keep Reece and deal with what’s wrong in her life.

The pace of the novel is quite fast, but it works. Scott starts the novel right away and doesn’t make you guess what’s going to happen. She dealt with an extremely tough subject delicately, but she didn’t gloss over things. She laid it all out there and that’s why the ending felt off to me.

I don’t want to give any spoilers, but the ending felt too abrupt and left a few too many things in the air for my taste. I don’t mind using my own imagination to come up with how the story continues, but there was too much left unanswered for me with this ending. Just a little bit more, covering the conversation she was about to have, would have felt like a better fitting ending.

Live Through This is a mature novel that handles the topic of sexual abuse as best as a book can. I didn’t feel as connected with the characters as I would have liked, and the ending didn’t feel like quite enough, but it is still a good book.

If Live Through This sounds like your kind of book, you can purchase it here:
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