Review: With This Frame by Lindy Zart

[Hans08]

Within This Frame by Lindy Zart is story of a young love too intense to handle for two messed up teens. Maggie Smiley and Lance Denton were co-stars in a hit tv series “Easier Said”. As a loveteam, they couldn’t help but be around each other although they couldn’t be any more different. She was sweet and innocent while he was arrogant, insensitive and selfish. She has supportive loving parents while he has a dead mother and a barely-there father. She was secretly anorexic while he has commitment problems. He lived in the moment, she lived in the future. He never understood love, hadn’t known how to properly love someone. All his life, he always felt unloved and unlovable so he constantly warns her away yet pull her back every time. All the while, she wants to find every broken thing inside of him and heal them all. She asks too much, he expects too less.

In the end, their emotions were too much for their fragile states to handle. Their breakup was the catalyst for their self-destruction over the years. For ten years, they were both miserable, trapped in the past of teenagers falling in love and summers that never end.

Within This Frame starts off with an older Maggie, who now is an overweight recluse, receiving an invitation for a reunion of the cast members of Easier Said. Dreading to face everyone and the public with her current state, she asks for her sister’s help to lose weight and who else knocks on her door the next day but Lance, her new fitness instructor, the same guy who broke her heart years ago.

The book was cleverly written in alternative chapters, the present in Maggie’s point of view and the past in Lance’s. Not only does it make for readers to easily see the growth in each characters and understand where they were coming from but it also hooks you right in. For every alternating chapters, glimpses of now and then makes it hard for one to put the book down.

I loved this book a lot. It may not be that of an original concept, but this book definitely made me feel. It made me feel connected to the characters. As if their journey was yours. It made me root for their love story to finally have a happy ending after everything they’ve been through. I loved both characters. It was easy to relate to their vulnerable, raw and candid sides. Honestly, this book made me shed some tears. I felt the pain, the hope and the fear of losing someone you want the most. It made me believe again that love could indeed transcend time.

It was well written and thought of so I rate this book a 4 out 4 stars. Definitely a must read for anyone who wants to feel that rush of one's true love.