Bianca never believed in love. She was always a very rational person. For her, love was purely chemical. From this rationality, her interest in medicine grew. She is still underage, however, already in the second year of med school. Her time is mostly spent learning more about neurology, her favorite specialty, and talking to her best friend. One day, she wakes up with weird symptoms but decides to ignore them. She must be acting dramatic. However, throughout the day, the symptoms worsen, culminating in a seizure that sends her to the hospital. While dealing with waiting for her real diagnosis and getting used to her new life in the hospital, she meets Josh, a cancer patient passionate about life and Jesus. Will she let her rational mind rest while she starts believing in something she cannot see? Maybe not all is meant to be understood.
I read this book in one sitting. It’s really easy to get captivated and tempted to finish it. The story was beautifully written and addresses different important themes that make you think about your own life, the environment around you, and being empathic towards different realities. The emotional growth of Bianca throughout the whole book and the way Josh helps her navigate vulnerability and her beliefs was lovely to witness. There are some really deep and touching quotes in this book, but there are also lighthearted moments that make you laugh with the characters, such as ones that can make you shed a tear. I loved the small interactions Bianca and Josh had in the beginning, discussing movies and, for once, feeling “normal” despite their diseases, in their little bubble of love. Josh’s character also reminded me a lot of Augustus Waters, with a touch of humor accompanied by intellectuality and the ability to show the FMC that they are beautiful, inside and out, and much more than a “clinical case”. I would like to know more about both Josh and Bianca’s paths, but I understood the importance of the open ending, and I’m not mad about it. I felt it made sense to end it that way, and to be honest, I feel I wouldn’t be prepared to read about Josh’s potential death and Bianca getting worse. I think it’s good that the last memory we had of them was a happy one. Despite this, I felt the final chapters were a bit rushed. Initially, I found myself thinking their decision to get married was hasty. But it quickly made me look at this scenario with more empathy, because anyone in their situation would feel everything much more deeply than someone who had only known each other for a few months in a normal scenario. I wish the characters' relationships with their parents had been explored more deeply, especially Josh's family situation. Other than that, it was a great and very touching read, able to make me empathize a lot with the characters. I like a book that makes me feel things, and the second I opened this book and read the dedication and the acknowledgments, I knew it would be a good one.
(This is in no way supposed to be hate btw <3) Where do I even start? I want to give constructive criticism, but I am not Bob the Builder and I feel only he has the manpower to fix this. This read like it had no editor. at. all. Full of grammatical errors, punctuation was nowhere to be seen, weird word choices, I didn’t even understand what some sentences meant. I wish I could give a detailed list, but the word limit won’t let me. Characters felt one dimensional and Bianca’s “““character development””” happened in like 2 chapters max. (which is approx. 4 pages tbh), people were constantly appearing and disappearing from places, Bianca mentioned things that she shouldn’t have been able to know (like how much time she was passed out for, before even talking to anyone), things were introduced when it was convenient to the plot without ever being mentioned before (like we only discovered Isabella in like page 70 after Mark had appeared multiple times already), and so many other things I could mention. Don’t even get me started on the number of medical malpractices, a lawyer would have a field day with this. A single court case would have been enough to pay for both of their hospital expenses. But anyway, congrats on the marriage of depression and anxiety.