The Quick Cut: Teen girl with cerebral palsy struggles to adapt after she finds out the truth behind her condition.
A Real Review:
Thank you to Sourcebooks Fire for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Having a lifelong debilitating condition can be struggling, but what if you found out that you didn't know the whole story? The truth can hurt when it appears in the light, but what if the person hiding it is somebody you trusted? It would be devastating on multiple levels. That is the reality for a girl named Jenna.
Jenna has cerebral palsy, but cerebral palsy doesn't have her. Although it's been a been a constant struggle in her life, she's never let it stop her from succeeding in school or whatever stands in her way. Unfortunately, it all comes crashing down when she finds out the reason why she has CP around the same time her childhood crush moves back to town. Can she overcome the past to get the man of her dreams?
Jenna is an aspiration in the differently abled community, but there's a problem with this story. As much as I enjoy the heroine who starts strong and falls apart just to build herself back up again, there's an issue of the distraction with the secondary storyline in childhood crush Julian.
Don't get me wrong, Julian has a bond with Jenna in the messages they share that creates a chemistry. Jenna gets a chance to be known without the CP being her most known feature and Julian lets himself be known in a different way. It's a beautiful story.
The problem is that this story should fill it's own novel. Between this romantic storyline and the far more intriguing one about Jenna struggling with the truth behind her CP (and controlling her medical choices), it ends up pulling down a story and characters that could have been bold. Instead they get blurred by too much in too few pages.
A sweet story with too many storylines put in too few pages.
My rating: 3 out of 5