Planning to Live by Heather Wardell

August 31st 2010 by CreateSpace

Paperback, 238 Pages

Review Ebook Copy

Determined to lose weight for her best friend's wedding, goal-obsessed Rhiannon flees her parents' Christmas Day feast to avoid overeating but her car skids off the deserted road into a tree. Trapped and bleeding, with her cell phone out of reach, she struggles to escape, and to accept that she's spent her whole life planning but hasn't ever really lived. The question lingers.....will she get the chance to change that?

Review

Planning to Live takes us on a woman’s journey into the frightening, the heartbreaking and the frustrating. Plans and goals- that’s what makes a successful person. Rhiannon is a goal-setter. She has timelines for work and has a strict daily regiment on how she eats. The plans must be stuck to- no deviating and no excuses. Her most recent plan is losing weight for her best friends wedding, she struggles with this not only because she wants to look great in a brides maid dress, but she’s trying to work through the sadness of her dead fiancé Bill. Losing him has been the hardest thing she’s ever faced until Rhiannon is sitting trapped in her car in a blizzard.

Sitting in this cold, broke down car on Christmas night was never in the plan for Rhiannon's life. The plan was to avoid all her moms yummy treats so she could squeeze out another 3 or 6 pounds before her best friends wedding, but she stuck to the plan and left early resulting in sliding on some ice and becoming severely injured, she cant move, her foot is pinned and bleeding and every attempt to move it brings excruciating pain. With her phone out of reach and no Internet service, she’s literally stuck and cut off from any communication. The darkness and silence bring reflection and as panic floods in we the readers are taken back through the course of a few years. We see her fall in love, lose that love to a horrific event, we see all her flaws, her depression, her determination and we see another man, Andrew come into her life and take on the role of to good to be true and then we see Rhiannon totally jerk it up by her insecurities.

I’m surprised by how much I liked this, due to the beginning which starts off a little rough. I thought Rhiannon was very redundant trying to get her point across and not until about three chapters in did I pick on the writing and why her character was this way…the girl was OCD to the core and not only was the woman a work-a-holic but she was obsessed about her weight. Being 5’10 and a size 16 put Rhiannon in that awkward overweight category, she couldn’t see the value or beauty in herself, she only saw her fat body. To me and the way other people saw her, Rhiannon really wasn’t this huge obese person, she compared herself to very thin women and to society standards but never really took into account how much potential her life carried.

In that way I could identify deeply with character, I think most women hit times in their life that body image and self esteem gets questioned- I’m sure many woman especially the ones trying to lose weight have felt the same things the character goes through. There were a lot of virtues in Rhiannon that I admired; her determination, her goals, her loyalty to friends and family, but she had many weaknesses that turned me off from her as well. She was obsessed about her weight to the point of irritating- to the point that it took away from her life and it reeked havoc on some of her relationships. She really hardly ate at all and she worked out everyday but still seemed to struggle with taking weight off, I think perhaps Rhiannon never stopped to think with her height and her body frame that her weight may have been perfect for her. She also made a few really terrible decisions in the novel, one in particular with Joel that shocked me……..I seriously wanted to crawl in the book and slap her silly. Rhiannon defiantly spent more time planning her life and worrying about her weight than she did actually living it. She rarely enjoyed eating, she rarely laughed and let go of her worry’s, which in the end is really sad. If I can walk away with anything from this novel- it is that living my life and having many carefree and happy moments will outweigh the size of my jeans, the bills I have to pay or the weight watcher points I count.

This was a fast read- one that gave me glimpses of happiness, family and love, but also took me into the mistakes one can make with being overly focused, passing up relationships and not enjoying life because self-doubt and worry invade those places. Where Rhiannon seems redundant in spots with the over analyzing of her body, the twists and turns surprised me….and the ending was a total shocker, I would recommend this to readers who love contemporary fiction or those who like dramatic romance.

Rating

Planning to Live is recommended to adult readers but could be read by the mature teen (17&up) and contains: Self-image issues- dealing with weight and self-esteem, sexuality mild to graphic scenes, language, drinking, violence, murder and scum-bags named Joel.

4/5- Women's Contemporary Fiction

Thanks to Heather for review copy!!