I will not lie. There are times where Ellie got on my last nerve but that shows the ability of Gretchen Schreiber’s writing. Throughout this book, it felt very vulnerable for both Ellie and her mom. You understand both of their perspectives on how they deal with Ellie’s illness. I think this would be a great book for middle schoolers and high schoolers.

Okay, first off, wow. This book was so intricately detailed and really gave me an insight into what it’s like having a disease/disability. The only thing I wish would’ve been more detailed was the definition of VACTERLS. I had to look up what the disease actually was, but other than that, this book was amazing!

Ellie Haycock is a teenager who’s had around 40 surgeries because of her genetic disease. She constantly has to stay at a home the hospital provides with her mom due to medical concerns. She also separates her hospital life from her home life, which causes rifts in all of her friendships. Her boyfriend surprises her when she’s at Coffman, and ends up breaking up with her because she doesn’t want to tell him anything about her hospital life.

A lot of the story after that revolves around her wanting to get back to Jack (her ex boyfriend) to reconcile, but throughout the book, she bonds with another patient, Ryan, who has an unknown autoimmune disease. She slowly finds herself not wanting to get back to Jack, but to get closer to Ryan.

The book also has a valuable lesson in it; doctors aren’t always going to be able to fix everything. Ellie had a cough in her lungs the entire book, and even though she had surgery (that was unsuccessful), she still suffers from it. Her favorite doctor had his suspicions it was because of the ventilation and cleanliness of her school causing her cough since she had pretty bad lungs.

All in all, I definitely enjoyed this book.

It is always so wonderful to see disability representation by a disabled author! Getting to experience that always brings me joy. The discussions of media consent felt very needed and I wish they had been explored even further. However, the prose could have been much tighter and clearer. There were multiple plot points I struggled to understand or that lost impact because of the prose.

Thank you to Wednesday Books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I have never simultaneously loved and hated a book so much—loved because it is so entirely quotable, and hated because it deeply lacks intersectionality and nuance, and has a conclusion which glosses over the main character’s trauma in order to redeem the narrative’s ableist villains.

I have spent months debating whether or not to review this book. I received it as an uncorrected bound manuscript earlier this year from the publisher, but it wasn’t until I received an ARC of it from the publisher this morning that I decided to give the book another chance and skim through the ARC while comparing it to the bound manuscript.

I would first like to say that I don’t want to criticize this author—especially because she is writing the main character’s story from her own personal experience. I think disabled authors should have the ability to write their own perspectives without fear of being criticized for it.

That said, the author’s lack of intersectionality when writing outside her lived experience contributed to issues within the narrative.

There are two BIPOC characters in this story—Ryan Kim, who is Korean, and Luis, who is described as having brown skin and then never actually even assigned an ethnicity. Please take what I am about to say with a grain of salt; I am white and would really recommend this book get into the hands of disabled BIPOC reviewers who can better critique this. Besides the fact that Ryan and Luis are BIPOC only in name, the author also does not take into account the fact that the medical industry in America is largely racist, and she writes both of their experiences as if they are white. Much of the book read as largely white feminist—and horribly ignorant. Many times, the main character will talk about how she does not want to be treated a certain way for having a disability—and will immediately turn around and treat Luis the same way because he has cancer.

Ryan Kim is the love interest, and he is honestly right up there with the Darkling and Edward Cullen in terms of awful. Not only does he belittle Ellie’s experiences—which include medical gaslighting, medical trauma, PTSD due to medical experiences, and lack of autonomy in medical decisions—but he is routinely misogynistic and spends the bulk of the book trying to convince Ellie to internalize his own internalized ableism. Ryan’s role within the narrative ultimately destroys what could have been an interesting take on autonomy—especially how it relates to disabled kids.

At one point, Ryan tells Ellie in a wildly ableist tirade (in which he calls her "lucky" for not being able to play sports due to her disability) that if disability is a sport (it isn’t) then parents of disabled kids are coaches and their doctors are their teammates. And if parents are coaches, a part of coaching is talking to other coaches (parents of disabled kids) to make difficult decisions. To any parents of disabled kids who are reading this: fuck no to that. If you are commiserating about how difficult it is to be a caregiver, absolutely go to other caregivers. Y’all can be each other’s support systems. But if you need to make a difficult decision that affects the life of your disabled kid, a caregiver has never been on the opposite side of that. You should have a network of actually disabled adults who’ve been through what your kid has been through. You owe that to your disabled kid. Ask the people who were affected by the decision their parents made. Not the people who made the decision. Disabled people aren’t static objects in your life story. Don’t take advice from the teenage picture of Internalized Ableism, m’kay?

All in all, I do not recommend this book.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for the ARC. All views reflected are my own.

Thank you to Wednesday books for the arc in exchange for review!

This was such a heart warming emotional story. I couldn’t put it down.

I LOVE THIS BOOK. Ellie is such a multi dimensional character and I fell deeply in love with her and Ryan. SO SAY WE ALL.