Five Feet Apart by Rachael LippincottMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
Stella is the model CF (cystic fibrosis) patient while Will is the rebel who just wants to *live* in the days he has left. This is the story of what happens when the two meet.
I'll preface this by saying were I not reading this for book club, I would have rolled my eyes and given up a couple of chapters in. Instead, I just rolled my eyes throughout.
I'm not sure if some of my issues stem from the story meant to be a movie and the book being based on a screenplay making it weird (or the screen play and book were written at the same time - I've seen both options when I was doing some quick research on the tie-in).
My first eye roll came from Stella's senior class taking a two week trip to Cabo. What kind of school takes that kind of senior trip?!? And had Stella been healthy enough to go, how would her parents afford said trip on top of a decade of hospital stays and major medical issues?
Where were timeline discrepancies, language, and talk of sex.
The prose was fairly dreadful. Mainly due to word choices like characters with CF "sprinting" and running up stairs regularly. Really? With 35% lung capacity?
But the characters are really what earned it my one start rating. They were just flat. Basic. One-dimensional. Even their "character growth" (if you can call it that) was predictable and plastic feeling.
The whole book was just too melodramatic and over-the-top angsty for me. And I've known some melodramatic, angsty teens in my time.
And what kind of ending was that?!?
Ending on a positive, I am glad for a book shedding light on CF and its treatments. I thought those pieces (hacking mucous, weight loss, etc) were important and some of the only realistic pieces of the book, despite how the characters acted otherwise.
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