She, Myself, and I

September 1, 2017

Gr 10 Up-Rosa is the first recipient of a full-body transplant: her brain in another girl's body. And while she's recovering, she can't help but wonder about her donor Sylvia This book's premise centers around the problematic "Miracle Cure" trope, in which a person with a disability is miraculously healed. Readers see very little of Rosa before her transplant (is the life of a quadriplegic teenager uninteresting?), and her physical recovery is similarly given short shrift in the text. While the psychological exploration of mind/body dualism proposed by the narrative could have been intriguing, instead, Rosa goes on a totally predictable road trip with a cute boy. Because of the lack of exploration of the life of a person with severe mobility impairment, the explicit disdain for ideas of medical ethics, and the cliched YA romance, this is a book to pass on. VERDICT This title doesn't rise above its problematic premise, exploring cliched romance instead of the depths of the world it proposes.-L. Lee Butler, Hart Middle School, Washington, DC

Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2017
A disabled young woman gets her brain transplanted into the body of an attractive comatose donor.Rosa, an 18-year-old from London, has been disabled since childhood with an unnamed and vaguely defined terminal nerve disorder. When she gets the opportunity for a groundbreaking, secretive transplant surgery, her family rushes to America. Rosa knows almost nothing about her donor, Sylvia, except that she was a white 18-year-old like Rosa who's been in a coma since an accident. As Rosa recovers in rehab and builds a secretive romance with Joe, a tattooed white boy, she ponders the nature of her soul. With no rumination about the disability she's lived with for most of her life, her introspection lacks believability. Even while Rosa worries if Joe loves her or loves Sylvia's body, she never questions her conviction that in her prior body she'd been nonsexual, ineligible for romance. Rosa relies on her accent and her own mannerisms as identity-building evidence without exploring what it means that she retained them post-surgery. In a shocking and unexamined scene, Rosa and a fellow patient make a friendly date for hospital movie night to see Me Before You, a 2016 romance about a paralyzed man who chooses euthanasia over living disabled--a thoroughly inappropriate rehab-hospital film. A florid rumination on identity, utterly incurious about science, disability, or what makes life worth living. (Science fiction. 14-18)

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July 1, 2018
Eighteen-year-old Londoner Rosa becomes the world's first survivor of a brain transplant after her healthy brain is transplanted from her quadriplegic body into brain-dead Sylvia's body. Rosa becomes fixated on the prior life of the girl whose body she now inhabits, leading Rosa on her own soul-searching road trip. Despite some implausible scenarios and too-neat resolutions, Young has envisioned an original and compelling concept.

(Copyright 2018 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)