Source:
From Librarything Early Reviewers and Penguin Teen in exchange for an
honest review. This in no way alters my opinion or review.
Publisher: Penguin Teen
Publication Date: September 25, 2018
Rating:
Goodreads Synopsis:
Abby Furlowe has plans. Big plans. She's hot, she's popular, she's a cheerleader and she's going to break out of her small Texas town and make it big. Fame and fortune, adoration and accolades. It'll all be hers.
But then she notices some spots on her skin. She writes them off as a rash, but things only get worse. She's tired all the time, her hands and feet are numb and her face starts to look like day-old pizza. By the time her seventeenth birthday rolls around, she's tried every cream and medication the doctors have thrown at her, but nothing works. When she falls doing a routine cheerleading stunt and slips into a coma, her mystery illness goes into overdrive and finally gets diagnosed: Hansen's Disease, aka leprosy.
Abby is sent to a facility to recover and deal with this new reality. Her many misdiagnoses mean that some permanent damage has been done, and all of her plans suddenly come tumbling down. If she can't even wear high heels anymore, what is the point of living? Cheerleading is out the window, and she might not even make it to prom. PROM!
But it's during this recovery that Abby has to learn to live with something even more difficult than Hansen's Disease. She's becoming aware of who she really was before and what her behavior was doing to others; now she's on the other side of the fence looking in, and she doesn't like what she sees. . .
Review:
This synopsis sums this book up pretty well. I read through this book pretty quickly and it was paced very well but it was a bit annoying. Abby is a popular girl, who has it all, she is pretty, popular, and even a cheerleader - the perfect stereotype for a mean girl, and she is a mean girl (not the worst). She is stricken with this disease and her whole world turns upside down. Now, she is ugly and her friends start to abandon her.
The book is told through Abby, how she feels and everything she is going through. Instead of chapters it is written more like diary style, without any real headings, just breaks in the text and I think that is what made it such a quick read. There were god stopping points, but unlike books with chapters it was hard to convince yourself you were at a good stopping point.
Anywho, more about the plot: Abby's disease spread and the family trying to figure out what it is, was the most interesting part of the book and done really well. How she feels betrayed was also pretty spot-on. However, while some might feel sorry for her, she was whiny and still pretty mean to other people even while going through this process. Abby acts entitled and snobby through most of the book. There were also some points about graduating that were weird - she wants to go to LA for acting, so she is a cheerleader and wants a cheerleading scholarship to go to an LA school... and she doesn't realize she will have to then be a cheerleader at that school, why didn't she take up theater in her high school if she wanted to act? These were things that were hard for me to shake out and not be confused about. I completely understand how life-plans can be confusing but these were more common sense things.
All in all, this was an entertaining book, and if you are looking for something about disease and coping, this might be a healthy book to read. However, if the whiny teenage-girl thing is not something you can handle, this one will fall a little short.
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