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.