Let me start with the one thing I’ll give it real credit for: it put cystic fibrosis on my radar. I genuinely didn’t know much about CF before this, so points for that. But once I went and actually read up on the disease, the book’s version of it started to feel awfully sanitised. Lippincott takes a few of the more photogenic complications and quietly leaves out everything that makes life with CF so brutal. None of the three CFers we meet deal with the digestive side of it, none of them are underweight, nobody’s throwing up mucus, and apart from Stella’s G-tube, the disease is mostly kept at a tasteful distance. It doesn’t fit the narrative, so it’s not shown. Which means that for a book that markets itself as spreading awareness, it isn’t being all that faithful to the thing it’s raising awareness about.

Then there’s the romance, which triggers a peeve I run into constantly. Stella and Will meet, and within a couple of days they’re head over heels. The whole affair lasts a few months and gets framed as this towering tragedy of their lives. I just don’t buy it. I can’t picture anyone knowing a person for that short a stretch and being ready to give up a lung transplant over them, on the logic that a transplant would mean never seeing them again. That’s a colossal call to make over a courtship you could measure in weeks. Maybe I’m being more pragmatic than romantic here, but I am a romantic at heart, and even I can’t get there.

Alice, and Alice’s death, is a whole plot point that goes nowhere. It exists purely to give Will something to be aloof and closed-off about, which in turn gives Stella a reason to get annoyed with him, which manufactures the obligatory young-love fight-and-separation before they inevitably drift back to each other (not literally, given the whole premise 😂). A complete waste of a thread.

And now my biggest gripe: main characters who take stupid, unnecessary risks and walk away without a scratch. Stella and Will are supposed to keep six feet apart. They shave it to five. Fine, five feet is a small, cheeky rebellion. But then they’re holding hands. And then she falls into the lake and he does CPR on her. At that point she has more than earned a B. cepacia infection, and of course, she doesn’t get it, she gets her transplant, and she sails off into her life with zero consequences. My problem with this is that teenagers read these books and romanticise the rebellion, and nobody bothers to show them the other side of the ledger, that recklessness has a cost. Just because it all works out in fictional fairyland doesn’t mean it plays out that way in the real world.

I know I’ve spent this entire section cataloguing what didn’t work, but that’s kind of the point: when I try to reach for something that genuinely stood out on the positive side, I come up empty. I’ve already told you what the book is and what to expect from it. Everything else is just the stuff that nagged at me.