Thaw -- Monica M. Roe
From Thaw:
Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Stupid name for a disease. It's always cracked me up how arrogant scientists are, ever anxious to slap their names onto absolutely anything, just to prove they were the first to notice it. Doesn't matter if it's the cure for AIDS or a new species of sea slug.
Or a crazy disease that turns your body's own immune system against you, your cells eating their way up your nerves like a deranged game of Pac-Man until you're completely paralyzed, can't talk, can't even breathe without some machine doing the job for you.
Less than a month ago, high-school senior Dane Rafferty stopped halfway through a ski race for a snack break and still won with plenty of time to spare. Now he's flat on his back in a hospital room, unable to move much more than his eyes and his mouth.
The good news is that 75% of Guillain-Barré Syndrome patients make a full recovery. So his parents have shipped him off to one of the best rehabilitation facilities in the country, despite the fact that they live in upstate New York and it's in Florida. As his mother said when he was loaded onto the plane, "We'll see you as soon as you're up and running, dear."
Yeah. There's a lot more going on in Dane's life than the GBS. Through his first-person account, he tells the story of his rehabilitation and, through flashbacks, the story of what came before.
How ironic is it that I read this one while waiting for the power to come on after the ice storm? (It still hasn't, by the way. We're on Day Six.)
Dane's voice is fantastic, but it's one that a lot of people will find very difficult to like. I really didn't even remotely understand what his girlfriend saw in him -- they had shared interests, sure, but he was a... well, he was a prick. Yeah, there are reasons for his behavior, for the way that he thinks, the way that he interacts with the world and yadda yadda yadda, but that doesn't erase how most other people would respond to the prickishness.
Then again, he reminded me of someone I knew* way back when, and everyone always fell all over him, too. But, regardless of Dane's unlikeability, he has a great voice -- and as the picture of his background becomes more clear, it's much easier to sympathize with him.
I found the details about the rehab process fascinating, and they flowed into the narrative naturally, as did the information about ecology and natural selection. Dane's interest in nature is believable; his enthusiasm (as contained as it is) is contagious. I did feel that towards the end it hit some pretty serious Afterschool Special Issue-y territory, which detracted from the book as a whole, but Dane's voice was so strong and his slowly growing and extremely tentative affection for the people at the Florida facility felt so genuine that I felt the author ultimately pulled it off.
According to this interview, there is a sequel of sort in the works. My bet is that it'll be about Carissa, the daughter of the man in the room across the hall from Dane.
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*Or, to be fair, my perception at the time of that person.