Five Feet Apart
2018
- children's fiction
- love, fiction
- diseases, fiction
- interpersonal relations, fiction
- adolescence, fiction
- nyt:young-adult-hardcover=2018-12-09
- cystic fibrosis
- juvenile fiction
- lungs
- transplantation
The story
In this #1 New York Times bestselling novel that’s perfect for fans of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, two teens fall in love with just one minor complication—they can’t get within a few feet of each other without risking their lives. Can you love someone you can never touch? Stella Grant likes to be in control—even though her totally out of control lungs have sent her in and out of the hospital most of her life. At this point, what Stella needs to control most is keeping herself away from anyone or anything that might pass along an infection and jeopardize the possibility of a lung transplant. Six feet apart. No exceptions. The only thing Will Newman wants to be in control of is getting out of this hospital. He couldn’t care less about his treatments, or a fancy new clinical drug trial. Soon, he’ll turn eighteen and then he’ll be able to unplug all these machines and actually go see the world, not just its hospitals. Will’s exactly what Stella needs to stay away from. If he so much as breathes on Stella, she could lose her spot on the transplant list. Either one of them could die. The only way to stay alive is to stay apart. But suddenly six feet doesn’t feel like safety. It feels like punishment. What if they could steal back just a little bit of the space their broken lungs have stolen from them? Would five feet apart really be so dangerous if it stops their hearts from breaking too?
What it’s like
Clinical white hospital corridors and sterile rooms give way to brighter, warmer spaces in this YA romance, where the prose is conversational and sharp, full of teenage wit and a hospital-bred dry humor. The mood is tender and bittersweet, a slow-building ache rather than a weeper's flood, with the claustrophobia of illness pressing against small acts of defiance: a hallway stolen, a shared window, a notebook passed back and forth. Chapters move briskly, with short scenes and frequent switches between the two narrators' perspectives, so the pacing feels urgent and intimate. Emotional register sits between hope and grief; the arc follows two guarded young people who learn to open up while their bodies keep threatening to close them off. Violence is absent, but medical crises, hospital procedures, and the fear of death recur, and there is some romantic and sexual tension handled with restraint, kissing and longing rather than explicit content. Best suited to readers who want a emotionally heavy but hopeful read for a rainy afternoon or a good cry on a long train ride, especially fans of John Green's intense, sweeping teen romances.
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