Review Detail

Maddy spends all of her days inside, with the only people she sees being her mother and her nurse Carla. Her disease makes it impossible for her to go outside so she takes classes online and spends the rest of her time reading or playing games with her mother. When a new family moves next door, Maddy finds herself fascinated by the son, Olly. Maddy can see herself falling for him, but is there any way a relationship between them won’t end in heartbreak?

This is a book I had been hearing about for a while so I was excited when I finally got my hands on a copy. It was short, just over 300 pages, and a lot of the chapters were very short, sometimes only a page, so it made for a quick read. But it was a read that I really enjoyed and, even with the seriousness of Maddy’s condition, found it quite light and adorable.

Maddy was a really interesting character. I loved her passion for her favourite books, something that was easy to relate to, her frustrations at being confined to her house were understandable, and her relationships with her mother and Carla were warm, playful, but also felt a little stunted since they were the only two people she physically interacted with in her life. She was lonely and needed someone in her life that wasn’t her mother, her nurse, or her teacher.

In came Olly. Olly was complicated and unpredictable but after locking eyes with Maddy, he became as fascinated by her as she was with him. Their friendship developed slowly, mostly online in late night IM’ing sessions, and it was sweet and gave them both someone to talk to when they needed it. His home life wasn’t perfect either and they slowly went fro being a distraction to each other’s problems to being someone they could really count on to be there.

As mentioned, it was a quick read, but not only because of the short chapters. There was just something about Maddy and Olly that made me want to see if they could find a way to really be together. There were some twists in the plot that I ended up picking up on so it was a bit predictable, but in the end it didn’t matter. It didn’t stop me from enjoying the characters and the book.