Five Feet Apart by Rachel Lippincott

YA Romance, 2018 by Simon and Schuster, 288 Pages 

What I Didn’t Like:

• We’ve heard this story before. Ill fated teenagers battling disease make a connection to each other. There’s an attempt here to tell a different story, but I’m not sure it’s different enough. 
• Instalove. This is one of my least favorite tropes and this is one of the poorest examples I’ve seen of it. I didn’t immediately love either one of these characters, they read pretty flat to me, so it was difficult to imagine they fell in love with each other so quickly. 
• I feel like this is a new textbook example we can use anytime someone asks what bury your gays is/means. Sigh, he deserves better. 
• Melodramatic. That’s the only word I could think of to describe how everything about the characters and their situations gets blown up. Everything is the highest level of emergency, everything is timed in the absolutely worst ways, it’s all just really melodramatic. I’m including the overuse of the exclamation marks, italics, and capital letters in that because it certainly didn’t help (I did peruse a hardcover copy at the bookstore before deciding I’d better try this one as audio to avoid all that). 

What I Did Like:

• Highlighting cystic fibrosis. That’s the biggest win for this book. It takes a look at a disease many people don’t know about in a way that, for the most part, is accurate. They did have a CF expert consulting on the project. 
• It’s cute. Really, that’s what it was aiming for and it hit that. The romance line is cute. 

Who Should Read This One:

• I’d say this one is really for younger teens or older kiddos (think 11-14) who are curious about cystic fibrosis and are into the cute romance lines. 

My Rating: 2 Stars

• For me the melodrama, instalove, and recycled storylines were a bit much and made this one problematic. A lot of people feel VERY differently though. Remember, reviews are subjective.