Five Feet Apart

Author: Rachael Lippincott

Rating: 4/5

Pages: 276

Year Published: 2018

Synopsis (From Goodreads): “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?”

When I first picked up this book I had mixed feelings. I was scared that it would be cliché and romanticizing CF which is a terminal illness. To some extent I feel like this book does

romanticize the disease, and that upsets me since there is nothing romantic about somebody dying, but since that was what I expected it wasn’t as bad. The good thing about it, even though it does but at the same time doesn’t focus on CF, is that it raises awareness about the disease.

At the same time I loved it since I wanted that secure feeling of knowing what to expect, and falling in love with something that is so unreal yet so scary and terrible, because CF is terrible. The characters were a bit cliché. Will being the cold boy who has given up on life, knowing that nothing can save him, fighting everybody in his life. Stella, the control freak, who is desperately trying to puzzle her family back together after her sister’s death, who also attempts to fix Will. I thought I would hate Will since I’ve met him in so many different books before, but I didn’t and I can’t explain why. I liked Stella, but parts of her didn’t make sense to me, her behavior changed so fast in the end of the book that I didn’t follow. Poe’s dying felt so unnecessary to me, but that might have been because I liked him, but I still can’t see no point in him dying, except to make Stella reckless.

The author has made a fantastic job, making me feel Will’s and Stella’s desperation and longing for each other. I longed for them to touch, and it drove me crazy that they couldn’t. When Will finally did I was both happy and upset because I knew the risk for Stella, but at the same time I knew that she would turn out fine in the end, because she was a fighter. Both Stella and Will are the main characters, and the book is written out of a first point of view. This book is All The Bright Places meeting The Fault In Our Stars, and will have you crying. It is bittersweet and I didn’t want it to end, and I couldn’t get enough. When I was forced to put it down I thought about it, and when I was reading it I had to remind myself to read slower so that it would last longer. The interesting thing about it is that it is based off of a screen play, and I’m dying to see the movie.