Think this book was just trying to do a bit too much - it would've been enough I think just to have the two girls going through their separate issues rather than the whole escape plot too.

Beautiful alternative coming of age story.


Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me access an ARC of this book in exchange for my feedback.

Unfortunately I no longer wish to review this book as the first few chapters did not reel me in. Thank you for the opportunity.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I loved it, and it definitely wasn’t a favourite, but I did enjoy it. The premise was really interesting, it’s pretty different from books I’ve read in the past, so I was intrigued to read it and see where it went. I enjoyed reading and Rosa’s life and her recovery, however I might have like to see more about her life with the terminal nerve disorder. I think that representation is important so I would have like to see her ill/disabled and not just focus on her as able-bodied and in recovery.
The book definitely made me consider a lot of life, and death and faith. It poses a lot of questions for the reader to think about, especially in terms of ethical concerns about the surgery, and the debate of what happens to the souls of patients. I found it interesting to stop and think and make my own decisions whilst also reading from the point of view of the characters within this story.
It’s a deep and dark plot, about illness and contemplation of faith, but I think it was well written so it didn’t feel look heavy reading it. The tone and writing style were fairly light which made it a lot easier to read, which was good. On the other hand, sometimes I found the writing to be a bit simplistic. Whilst I enjoyed it not being too dark, and liked being able to read it quickly, I would have preferred a bit more description in some parts.
I also enjoyed the characters, not just the main characters, but I think the secondary characters, such as her brother Elliot, where really well developed. They weren’t necessarily always perfect or likeable, but sometimes secondary characters are forgotten about a bit and underdeveloped, but I didn’t find that here!
Overall, I enjoyed it a lot, but I would have liked perhaps a bit more of a focus on her life with the illness, as that was a bit part of the synopsis but it focused on very little. Other than that, it was a quick, easy read that definitely made me think.

Such an interesting idea, a really gripping premise, but I struggled with the characterisation in this book. It just didn't quite work for me and I found it a bit slow. It was less contemporary than I first though, with the brain/body transplant more of a sci-fi idea.

I first heard about this book at the Stripes event in Jan 2017. I enjoyed it a lot, the ideas the book portrayed were fascinating and clearly well-researched. It just fell a bit flat with pacing, I started to get a bit bored at the end. Also I think the characters would have had a lot more to deal with than they did, emotionally.

She, Myself and I follows Rosa, the world's first success story of a brain transplant and how she adjusts to living in someone else's body.
I have mixed feelings about this book.
Firstly, I think Emma Young has done an amazing job at capturing the rollercoaster of emotions that someone may be feeling after an operation of that magnitude. I loved Rosa's inner turmoil of wanting to be grateful for her new body but also her guilt for the young girl whose life was lost.
I loved the characters in this story, especially Rosa's brother. His sarcasm and light-heartedness gave humour exactly where it was needed yet he still managed to be thoughtful and serious when it was needed, in the end being the rock Rosa needed. I thought Joe was a great companion for Rosa and enjoyed finding out more about his past as I read on.
The only negative I had is that I felt the story was slow in places. It took me a while to get through it and it wasn't until the later chapters that I was desperate to keep reading. I will also mention that Rosa, being a girl who has lived her life with a disease, is extremely self-conscious and insecure which I found irritating at times however that is just personal preference as I find people like that in real life quite irritating too!
In all, this is a great read and I would recommend to a friend.

This book requires the reader to suspend their disbelief to get on board with the concept, which was very easily done as the plot established itself quite credibly. Although I enjoyed the book, it didn't hold my attention very well which made for a very slow reading experience. I really enjoyed all of the characters in this book, particularly Elliott and Rosa, but there was a slight insta-love factor with Rosa and Joe that bothered me slightly, though their relationship was quite sweet. Overall, a fun book but not much more for me.

DNF at 29%. The book had an interesting concept but i didn't like the writing style and i didn't care for the characters

This was an interesting take on identity and what ifs. The story was well-written and drew me in and I loved the concept. Everything was really well researched and while not possible at the moment everything seemed plausible.

I really liked the characters, Rosa in particular was interesting in her lack of identity and introspection, she's intriguing in the nature/nurture context as well, how much does memory and experience shape us? I also loved Elliot's musings, particularly near the end.

Joe was nice but going across country when you've only known someone for a couple of days was not a sensible idea or one to be encouraged. The whole plotline around Joe and the instalove with him was the main reason stars were dropped.

I felt like the scene with Althea was too brief after so much build-up, I think that more could have been done there. Also a small niggle but Rosa's internet friend in Japan seemed a useless plot-point. Why mention lying to your internet friend if nothing is going to happen, I expected a scene later with Rosa coming clean about everything, especially as it's implied she's going to leak the truth anyway.

3/5 stars

This is a really good read. Rosa is slowly dying from a nerve disease and is given the chance of a new body. This story raises so many questions. If this was real life, how accepting would people be? How would you feel being in somebody elses body? This is an interesting, thought provoking story.

I really liked the sound of this book but sadly for me it didn’t really deliver. It was a very clever idea and well written, it just left me a but meh. Some bits were really good and I especially loved her relationship with her brother. It just didn’t seem to get anywhere. Sorry!

We spend our whole lives unintentionally committing ourselves to memory. We study the curve of our bodies, the shape of our faces, the dimple in our cheeks. that slightly crooked tooth or the moles we have dotted about our skin. We like some of them, so much so we probably wouldn’t give them up lightly, but others we might swap gladly. But whether we like what we see, or not, the person we see looking back at us in the mirror is who “me” is. So imagine, and really genuinely try to imagine, that the next time you look into that same mirror it’s like looking across a sink in a bathroom at a stranger washing their hands across from you. You don’t know the way their hair flops to one side all the time which gets on their nerves, you don’t know about that scar on their knee from when they fell off their bikes and you definitely don’t know what makes them “them”. Would you want to? Would you trade places? Would you still be “me” if your brain was in their body?

That’s pretty much Rosa’s dilemma now. Because after suffering from the age of seven from symptoms of a seriously damaging and debilitating nerve disease, Rosa has been selected for a breakthrough surgery which sees her brain being put into the head of another girls body. Sylvia.

The author of this book has so artfully handled some really mind blowing questions, largely about our identities to ourselves but also about how people identify us, or with us. There is so much more to us than the body we carry ourselves in.

I loved Rosa, her voice was the perfect blend of sarcasm, vulnerability and fight that I just love to read about. Her journey is pretty weird - I mean she’s going to find out about the dead girl whose body she’s so fortunate to live in (mind blowing again!). But the thought processes, questions and possibilities of such a thing are what makes this book so brilliant.

This is a book about identity.. But it is also so much more than that. An easy book to recommend.

Thank you Netgalley for the amazing ARC.

Originally I was skeptical of the premise as I am not a big fan of medically based novels but honestly I loved this.

I loved the fact that it not only incorporated what it would be like for the recipient but also for the parents and the donor family and friends.

I also enjoyed Joe - as a journalist myself - I found what he was doing fun and exciting and different. A major part that I enjoyed that while there was an undertone of romance there wasn't a big deal over it and it just happened slowly over the course of the novel rather than just happening straight away.
Seeing the development of Rosa as a character was amazing to see and I felt that I was able to develop along with her.

I loved the writing - clear and concise it didn't spin off into long monologues or have pages and pages of dialogue. It made it clear what was being wrote about, with Emma Young even using it to help explain some of the more difficult and harder to understand medical jargon.

The reason that I never made it five stars is due to the fact that I felt there could have been a little bit more background about how the disease came around and also some more information on the family of Rosa - I would have liked to know more about Elliot in particular.

Would definitely recommend.

I received a copy of this book from netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Slight spoilers ahead, nothing too major but if you haven’t finished the book yet, please don’t read incase.
Rosa is a teenage quadriplegic with a degenerative disease. Both she and her parents see a trial treatment as the only chance for Rosa to survive, nevermind have a life where she isn’t constantly depending on her parents. The treatment she receives is a brain transplant into the body of another teenage girl, Sylvia, who was involved in an accident which left her brain dead.
Overall, I enjoyed the story. There was the typical instalove which you just can’t seem to get away from in YA books these days, both with with secrets they were hiding from each other. The road trip which, less common, but always for self discovery in a way. The fall out of said road trip, arguments with family and the drama this causes for the couple.
At first I really enjoyed the character of Rosa, but from the second she left the hospital for the weekend with Joe she became more and more annoying to me. After going through life thinking that you would never walk again or be able to perform simple tasks, I can understand the urge to go and do something reckless, something you never thought you could do, but everything she did on the trip really annoyed me. She shows up randomly in a small town wearing a dead girls face and flat out lies to the friends of said dead girl. The lie she told about being the long lost adopted twin coming back to learn about her sister is just horrible. Not only does this lie hurt Sylvia’s best friend when she is told this, what this lie could do to her family is unimaginable. Especially after learning about Sylvia’s mothers medical issues so soon after her death. What this would have done to Daniel if it had been spread around town is horrible to think about.
Joes story interested me more, the story about his mum was bittersweet, after seeing close family members suffering from terminal illnesses myself I can totally understand his thought process.
Overall, I enjoyed the book for the most part, but more so for Joe than for Rosa.
2.5/5 stars

This review appears on Goodreads, and will be cross-posted to my blog.

I actually enjoyed this a lot. More than I expected to, for some reason, although I'm not sure why my expectations were so low -- possibly because I don't read a huge amount of contemporary? Although this isn't exactly straightforward contemporary. Modern medicine isn't quite at the stage of brain transplants, although we're getting closer every day, so I guess there's a slightly speculative aspect to this.

Anyway, this is about a girl with a degenerative nerve disease whose brain is transplanted into the body of a coma patient. It explores some pretty big themes, as you can imagine: what are you prepared to do to stay alive? What makes you <i>you</i>, and can you still be yourself when you look completely different? How do you know if people like you for yourself or for the body you happen to be wearing?

And, of course, once you bring theology into the question it becomes more complicated. Is it ethical to perform an operation like this, and what happens to the souls of both patients?

You can imagine, then, that the book is quite heavy. But it's actually not. It manages to keep the tone relatively light, and while I'm not exactly the best judge of books that talk about dying (look. I exist in a permanent state of terror about mortality and am very easily triggered into yet another existential crisis, I handle the thought of death very badly), I never felt like it went too dark.

I also really, really loved Rosa's brother Elliot. He's irreverent, sometimes inappropriate, and not afraid to say things like they are -- but he's also amazing. He cares so much. He manages to be unexpectedly philosophical. He knows how to make Rosa feel better when nobody else can. And he's just super awesome. Like, I'm a sucker for great sibling relationships, and this one in particular got to me.

I have to admit, I didn't really understand Rosa's decision to go off on a road trip with Joe, an aspiring journalist she meets in the park outside the hospital. I get that she needs answers about the girl whose body she now has; anyone would. But running away from hospital just seems like a ridiculous idea when you've had major surgery, especially with someone you barely know. I mean, come on, if you're going to go on a road trip, do it with your awesome brother!

(There was also romance with Joe, and I didn't object to it as much as I thought I might, mostly because it did serve to underline the broader questions of identity and what it means to have someone else's body, but it might have worked just as well without.)

I enjoyed the writing style, though I'm not sure there was particularly anything unusual about it. It just managed not to annoy me, and I've read too many books with an annoying writing style lately, so I guess I'm more easily pleased than sometimes.

I've seen a few reviews were people have suggested that perhaps the central conceit of the novel is ableist: was Rosa's life not worth living because she was paralysed? Isn't it inherently problematic to say she needs a 'healthy' body to live her best life? I have to admit, I didn't think about that while reading. But that's mostly because it seemed to me that her disease was literally killing her, and that this was a last resort to avoid certain death that would otherwise occur before too long. I'm not paralysed in any way, and I can't speak for the representation on that front, though I feel slightly bad that it didn't occur to me to consider it earlier, but I didn't read it as 'disabled person has to become abled to be happy' -- I read it as 'dying person does what's necessary to Not Die', which is quite a different story.

On the whole, though, I found it enjoyable, and compulsive, and a distraction from all the things I was supposed to be reading for uni. It was probably a 3.5* read, but I'm going to be nice and round up.

Rosa is the first person in the world to receive a whole body donation. Her own body was failing and her brain was transplanted into someone elses. The concept of the book is really interesting but it isn't particularly well executed. The beginning of the book is really gripping but it starts to lag about halfway through which is quite disappointing.