I got this book off of BookOutlet when they had their Booktoberfest sale. I thought the cover was pretty and the title intrigued me. I didn’t read the summary (I rarely do these days), so I was a little disappointment when this didn’t end up being a romance. However, I did love the friendship between the two guys develop and I got over my disappointment pretty quickly.
Summary:
Ollie and Moritz are best friends, but they can never meet. Ollie is allergic to electricity. Contact with it causes debilitating seizures. Moritz’s weak heart is kept pumping by an electronic pacemaker. If they ever did meet, Ollie would seize. But Moritz would die without his pacemaker. Both hermits from society, the boys develop a fierce bond through letters that become a lifeline during dark times—as Ollie loses his only friend, Liz, to the normalcy of high school and Moritz deals with a bully set on destroying him.
Favorite things:
Their voices. I was so impressed by how distinctly different Ollie’s voice was from Moritzs. In fact this book is one of the few I’ve read from dual POVS, that actually sounded like dual POVS. You have Ollie who is funny, energetic and just sort of goofy and brilliant. Then we have Moritz who is down right mean at times. He’s moody and kind of rough around the edges but it’s not like he doesn’t have a reason to be.
The format. You guys know I love books written in different formats. This one was written entirely in letters and I loved that.
The medical sci-fi stuff. I really wish I could read more about all of the other experiments and more of what went on at the lab in general.*
Some favorite quotes:
“Nosebleeds = Friendship Maybe friends are drawn to bloodshed. You know. Like sharks”
“If you weren’t born screaming, then you were probably born with too much optimism.”
“Even if you are powerless, your words are not.”
The quills:
Cursing?
PG-13. This book does have the f word but instead of using the actual word it had a subsiture word, fluffing. I found this to be pretty funny in some situations .
Physical romance?
Nope.
Gore?
Not a whole lot, but there was a paragraph about a dead mouse that made me cringe.
Will you cry?
I did a little bit towards the end, but I’m extra sensitive to the situation that was happening.
Overall rating?
Three out of five hedgehogs.
The Author:
Leah Thomas, she doesn’t have a website that I could find but she does seem to be pretty active on her Goodreads page.
* I found out after writing this review that there is a sequel that just came out in February called Nowhere Near You and I think it will go into more of this exact thing. I’m pretty excited to read it and see if it does or not.
How do you feel when authors mash genres together? Like in this case I feel like this book was mostly contemporary but with a big dash of sci-fi. Do you know of any other books that do this?
The Hedgie Press 