Live the life you're given; love the life you make. Get out your tissue box; A TAYLOR-MADE LIFE by Kary Rader will make you laugh, cry, and contemplate your own life and mortality. With a bold female protagonist and a hardened hero, this novel confronts the difficulties of living and dying with cancer. I give it 4 stars.
In A TAYLOR-MADE LIFE, teenage Taylor Smith is living with leukemia, hoping for a bone marrow match to save her life. In the meantime, she is attempting to live her life to the full, and to her, that means experiencing sex. No sooner does she get her mom on board with her goal of finding a lover/one-night stand, but a cancer mentor program pairs her with Gavin Taylor, genius, wealthy, and extremely good looking computer programmer.
Gavin has undergone experimental treatments, but nothing has cured his cancer. He has anywhere from six months to two years to live, and is using a matchmaker for celebrities to find a wife who will love him for him and not for his money, and play computer games with him until his time is up. Once Gavin and Taylor meet, though, no one else will suffice for either of them, but as all couples do, these two have issues to work through.
I really enjoyed this novel, even though it seriously made me cry. I don't want to give anything away, but ironically, I would have given it 5 stars if the ending were a bit happier/ fluffier. I had to read or watch something really lighthearted so that I wouldn't succumb to the melancholy I felt upon finishing the book. My desires for a complete happy ending aside, the storyline seems very natural under the circumstances, although with healthy characters, the plotline and the mom's actions/attitude would be outrageously unbelievable.
The pacing and flow of the book were perfect, and there were only a handful of typos that were easy to get past. I appreciated the appropriately brief and vague love scenes, which allow a heat rating of 2 and make the book appropriate for teens and adults alike.
I could have used a bit more development of the romantic relationship, but it could be that my non-terminally ill mind cannot quite grasp the speed and certainty with which the characters fall in love with each other. Even so, I felt challenged by the characters to live the life I've been given and to stop dwelling on regrets or things I wish were different.
Overall, A TAYLOR-MADE LIFE is a great read that I highly recommend to all.
**Review originally written for The Romance Reviews.com at http://www.theromancereviews.com/viewbooks.php?bookid=9894.
