Gr 10 Up—From the first page, Madeline Whittier is a sympathetic character who has had to watch the world from the inside of a bubble—literally. Her diagnosed condition of Severe Combined Immunodeficiency is a life sentence that limits her to a world of two people: her mother, who is a doctor, and her nurse. Everything changes when Olly and his family move into the house next door. Olly is the kind of inventive guy who figures out a way to communicate with Madeline, and over the course of the next few months Madeline becomes Maddy, a young woman who takes potentially deadly risks to protect Olly emotionally, if not physically. Maddy's and Olly's hastily planned trip to Maui and their tastefully described liaison while there suggests a mature teen audience, but readers of Cammie McGovern's
Say What You Will (HarperCollins, 2014) and Wendy Mills's
Positively Beautiful (Bloomsbury, 2015) will fall in love with this humorously engaging story of a girl who discovers life, love, and forgiveness in new places.
Maddy, who suffers from Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, is resigned to her sequestered existence until Olly moves in next door. Their secret friendship blossoms into romance, then escalates into euphoria and then disaster when the couple runs away to Hawaii. With its assured twists and sensitive depiction of loneliness in many forms, this novel offers a thoughtful exploration of how we define living.
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