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A review by thebookhaze
Side Effects May Vary by Julie Murphy
2.0
I liked the idea of the book, but I didn't much like the actual story. It didn't make sense to me, the further I got into it. I know about cancer, and it doesn't work like that.
I read a lot of books, and there are a lot of things I can understand and suspend my belief for in fiction, but cancer stories are the hardest for me to relate to, because so many authors have used cancer for the sake of talking about living and dying, but they've twisted it into some kind of entity that does what they want it to instead of what it really is.
Even so, I can *try* to suspend my belief if I look at "cancer" as a vehicle for telling the story they want to tell, and I tried that with this book. So cancer aside, I still don't like the story. I don't get it. I don't get the pranks Alice played on her enemies. And I don't get the prank they played on her. I don't know what the big deal is. I don't get her attitude, and I don't get Harvey's attitude towards her. What is there to love about her? Just because they grew up together? I don't see any redeeming features about Alice and I don't get why Harvey would put up with so much from her.
There were some quotes I liked from the book, though:
"I knew how to die. It was the living that scared me."
"Money is the cure to cancer."
"...there was one privilege to dying: the right to live without consequence."
"Sometimes I wondered if the chemo was too much for one body to handle. And maybe it did more harm than good. Yeah, the chemo might kill the cancer, but it might kill Alice too."
The quotes about cancer pretty much sums up what I think about chemo and the idea of trying to cure cancer with chemo.
The quotes about living and dying, they are more profound, and one of the reasons why living like there's no tomorrow is a wonderful idea, but definitely not a good idea.
I read a lot of books, and there are a lot of things I can understand and suspend my belief for in fiction, but cancer stories are the hardest for me to relate to, because so many authors have used cancer for the sake of talking about living and dying, but they've twisted it into some kind of entity that does what they want it to instead of what it really is.
Even so, I can *try* to suspend my belief if I look at "cancer" as a vehicle for telling the story they want to tell, and I tried that with this book. So cancer aside, I still don't like the story. I don't get it. I don't get the pranks Alice played on her enemies. And I don't get the prank they played on her. I don't know what the big deal is. I don't get her attitude, and I don't get Harvey's attitude towards her. What is there to love about her? Just because they grew up together? I don't see any redeeming features about Alice and I don't get why Harvey would put up with so much from her.
There were some quotes I liked from the book, though:
"I knew how to die. It was the living that scared me."
"Money is the cure to cancer."
"...there was one privilege to dying: the right to live without consequence."
"Sometimes I wondered if the chemo was too much for one body to handle. And maybe it did more harm than good. Yeah, the chemo might kill the cancer, but it might kill Alice too."
The quotes about cancer pretty much sums up what I think about chemo and the idea of trying to cure cancer with chemo.
The quotes about living and dying, they are more profound, and one of the reasons why living like there's no tomorrow is a wonderful idea, but definitely not a good idea.