My best friend read this when we were 12 and bought me a copy at her school library book sale. We were totally obsessed - and I can't, for the life of me, figure out why. But we would adapt it into impromptu plays on the stage of the old school I lived by, and talk about it for hours. In hindsight, it really is a wonder why I chose to love it so much, since it is not at all like anything I would enjoy reading now. Maybe it was a friendship loyalty things. Maybe I thought I should love it since Kendra loved it, because she was the big literary influence in my life (based on the [come to find out, fake] fact that she learned to read before me). In any case, books like this should have been banned, far and wide, from my bookshelf. As a chronic worry wart and unrelenting hypochondriac, this work of fiction gave me all the medical backing I needed to convince myself I had cancer whenever I had a headache that lasted more than 15 minutes or felt fatigued in the middle of the day. Turns out, those were just symptoms of an onset of my teenage years.