Love In Focus by Lyla Lee Review

When her seven-year long relationship suddenly falls apart, relationship advice columnist Gemma Cho is convinced that real love doesn’t exist. As a bisexual woman who’s had zero luck with both men and women, she’s ready to give up on her own romantic prospects when she gets paired up with Celeste Min, a world-renowned photographer, on a highly visual, potentially career-saving piece on modern love.
 

Celeste is extremely talented, sexy, and gay, and would be the perfect collaborator and rebound for Gemma if it weren’t for one major fact: she’s Gemma’s ex, the one that broke her heart in college and moved to a whole another country before Gemma could even make sense of what went wrong between them. Despite working on a project together about what constitutes love and romance in the modern age, when it comes to their own affairs, both Gemma and Celeste are tripping over each other’s feet…and into each other’s arms.
 

Heightened by their shared love for love and the unmistakable sparks that still fly between them, Gemma and Celeste struggle to keep their relationship strictly professional. For the sake of her career, Gemma needs this piece to do well. And for the sake of what’s left of her beaten up hopeless romantic heart, she wants to fall head over heels for Celeste again. But can she trust Celeste to feel the same this time around?
 

LOVE IN FOCUS is a second chance sapphic rom com that will appeal to fans of THE BOLD TYPE and DELILAH GREEN DOESN’T CARE.

A cute sapphic second chance at love via exes forced to professionally collaborate, Love In Focus by Lyla Lee is an easy and light-hearted read perfectly pitched for cozy romance readers. While the overall story is nothing groundbreaking for the genre, the novel’s plot mechanism of ex’s artistically working together on a personal interest piece involving the meaning of love is an excellent premise. Unfortunately, despite having a great foundation and numerous interesting storylines to work off of, I found Love In Focus to repeatedly disappoint at every opportunity, the overall execution being sub-par and quite dull to read.

One of the most intriguing elements of Love In Focus is its focal plot mechanism, the photojournalism project “Modern Love In Focus”, featuring six couples of different ages and backgrounds sharing what love means to them. Some couples being queer, some interracial, spread across young, mid-age and senior couples, quantifying and reflecting on the different meanings and interpretations of love is a great concept. In addition to having a compelling reason to unexpectedly reunite college ex’s Gemma and Celeste, the novel’s other highlight is the story’s setting in the romantic and misty (or not depending who you ask) San Francisco as well as the pops of Korean American culture, albeit very surface level and basic. These two elements alone add a great deal of narrative flavor compared to what would’ve been a very pedestrian and standard story. Interesting ideas introduced include the cultural differences and views on the queer community in America vs Korea, conservative Asian household expectations, and the strong family-oriented values.

Unfortunately, despite the good ideas presented, the novel repeatedly fails to do anything with them. Every time the story introduces an interesting or more meaningful element, it reflects on it briefly and then toss it aside with no further development. Initially I thought it might’ve been an editing choice to keep the story condensed to allow for the book to either focus on Gemma and Celeste’s history (more on that shortly), or to reserve more pages for the couple’s interviews on love. However, the farther I read into the book, it was soon obvious that neither was the case, and Lee simply didn’t have the commitment or writing chops to follow through on any of the great ideas introduced. The love interviews and photojournalism piece had the narrative potential to easily push this book into litfic/womens literature territory similar to other well-known romance authors have done to great success, some examples being Ashley Poston’s the Seven Year Slip, Emily Henry with Great Big Beautiful Life, B.K. Borrison’s First-Time Caller, or Victoria Lavine’s Any Trope But You. However, the reality is that the interviews the book included were surface level at best and the kind of commentary I would’ve expected from a YA middle school book. Particularly with the later interviews that involve older and more mature couples, the reflections were surprisingly underwhelming; their inspiring or dramatic reveals coming off as “no duh” moments while Gemma and Celeste are emotionally touched or devastated. While likely intended to be a light-hearted read, I don’t think these moments were meant to be comedic, which is what I got for how unwarranted the emotional overreactions were.

Besides not being particularly insightful, the interviews and overall book as whole consistently suffer from very rushed pacing and an incredibly casual tone that borders on unprofessional. From work appointments, to Gemma’s girl talks with her best friends, to a work vacation with Celeste or even the dramatic New Years eve work party, everything is presented like the book is running at x2 speed and there’s a consistent lack of detail and development everywhere you look (the aforementioned romantic San Francisco setting is barely utilized). Particularly for romance novels, the books usually describe their characters in detail to not only give the reader a good idea of their looks, but also their vibe and personality. Taking Celeste for example, Gemma is shocked by her excessive and artful tattoos that are frowned upon in Korea. Yet at no point anywhere in the book are the tattoos described, which seems like a giant oversight given the appeal and sexiness of tattoos for the reader and Gemma. The same could be said about Gemma’s wardrobe and dresses (I read the Afterlight edition which features a lot of custom character artwork, but the artists likely had almost nothing to work with), the various cafes and bars the two visits, even the apartment flat Gemma crashes at, what little visuals that exist are barely serviceable. Throughout reading this book, I constantly felt like I was reading a very rough first draft where the author is just getting all their ideas down on paper to be filled in and completed later. The writing style and dialogue also felt consistently choppy, cliched, childish, the last point being a notable issue when the two women are supposed to be nearly 30 years old. The book also has the odd choice of writing Gemma’s perspective in the first-person present tense while the short occasional Celeste chapters are written in third-person present tense. It doesn’t necessarily affect the book’s content but it’s a bizarre writing choice that seems random with no purpose for it.

As a romance novel, I had hoped that for all the book’s poor execution on its workplace plot mechanism and side story elements, the abbreviated length would leave more time and attention for Gemma and Celeste’s relationship. Yet like other elements of the book, I found their relationship and character development to be severely lacking most of the time, occasionally veering into baffling silliness. While I won’t go into too much detail to avoid spoilers, their entire relationship troubles hinge on miscommunication, but it’s the type of miscommunication that is minor in nature that only becomes problematic when both constantly overreact. Second-chance at love is a deceptively challenging trope to use as it requires a plausible reason for the couple’s previous breakup, reason for not getting back together already, and finally a strong enough shift to warrant their reconciliation. Love In Focus unfortunately lacks the plotting or writing chops in all three areas, on top of its already rushed pacing. I personally had a lot of issues with the couple’s timeline, namely that they were together for a little less than a year during their senior year at college, followed by a breakup and separation for eight years. Perhaps I am not the most romantic or emotional person out there, but for me the story failed to convey or justify what exactly within that one year was so unforgettable for both women. Followed by a dramatic separation spanning eight years of no communication, reuniting, and then followed by “we both think we like each other but shouldn’t do anything”.

Not only did I find that approach to be unfitting, their history truly feeling like a high school romance rather than a fully fleshed out relationship, but the eight years apart also did not feel right. The way the novel portrays their time apart, it feels much more like 3-4 years at best, particularly due to the limited character growth between then and now. The story also has a second time jump near the book’s conclusion as part of the traditional third act conflict, but the resolution and chapters that follow it are so brief and abstract, the choice is more puzzling than anything else. Perhaps the biggest issue however is Gemma and Celeste’s chemistry. As a cis-man, I recognize I am far from the readership this book was likely written for despite having read a decent number of sapphic novels. That said, while cute, I felt like there wasn’t really any passion or interest between the two of them and I expected far more yearning or longing given the book’s blurb (there’s no yearning when things move and happen too fast). Despite being an adult novel per their ages and adult sexual content (which was surprisingly quite brief and was technically open-door yet always fades to black when it finally gets going), the internalized thoughts and feelings felt so juvenile and as the story progressed, their reasons for avoiding each other growing more and more silly. Particularly with Gemma, her core worry is that everyone breaks up with her or that she’ll be alone. But contextually the book only shows her one-year relationship with Celeste in college, followed by her eight-year relationship and eventual engagement to her fiancé. Two relationships are hardly anything to go off of and more problematic, a major source of conflict later in the story is Gemma’s lack of time being single to herself. This point directly conflicts with her plight of being unlovable and single which could’ve potentially been a launch point for character growth, yet the book’s solution to that is 8 months apart only for them to reunite again. On the flip side, Celeste’s reasons for avoiding Gemma are even more ridiculous and contradictory. The novel also has some cute scenes of work meetings that double as pseudo dates as well as the late work vacation trip, but again due to the book’s style of running through every chapter on fast-forward speed with no semblance of pacing or focus, there’s simply not enough material and time for character growth, let alone romantic chemistry.

While having great ideas and an outline for an effective romance novel, across the board Love In Focus felt like an underdeveloped and patchwork job of a book. Whether it be due to writing on a tight schedule, an unclear vision, or mismanaged editing, Lee’s consistent lack of detail and follow-through completely hobbles the story at every turn. Despite my low overall score for this book and the generally negative tone of my review however, Love In Focus frankly isn’t an awful or terrible read. Rather, it is perhaps one of the most forgettable, dull, and lackluster books I’ve picked up and although its 300-hundred-page length is short and very quick to read through, at the end of the day I don’t even know where those pages went or what they accomplished. Inoffensive through the merit of giving nothing of value and avoiding anything remotely unpleasant (apart from some minor biphobia from Celeste which is a conversation I will not be going into, please see other reviews for this book), as many others have said, perhaps the biggest offense a book can do is be boring and for me, Love In Focus was most certainly that. (Unrelated, why this got picked for Afterlight’s book subscription is a whole other discussion, surely there was some other queer novel with more going on released during pride month that could’ve been picked instead).