Gretchen Schreiber

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC of Ellie Haycock is Totally Normal.

I obviously started this book with a little bias toward liking our main character Ellie- having the kinship of sharing a first name. But as I read on, I just fell in love with her. Like many that have read this book I am a woman with several chronic illnesses (nothing to the degree of Ellie though). Watching her grow into a strong young woman over the course of this book felt so special. The Ellie we start with tends on more shy, just trying to survive to get back to her school friends and boyfriend who she has largely kept separate from this part (the sick part) of her life.

Ellie also struggles with her mother and her blog which details every little thing that Ellie goes through medically for the entire world to see, which makes Ellie feel almost like a character in her own story. This seems like a very timely subplot as the number of mommy bloggers, instagram and YouTube influences have blown up- showing the reverse uno of how it feels to have a mother detailing their life on the internet and how it affects relationships within the family structure.

Like all teens and adults, there comes a time in your life where you start to realize that some of your friends are significantly better friends to you than others. When Ellie's two separate worlds collide, she starts making some observations on how her friends treat others and what type of people she cares to surround herself with and make her feel better, rather than worse.

The chronic illness medical side also cannot be ignored in this book. Schreiber did an excellent job with the ins and out of what it is like to have a chronic illness, as she has the one which Ellie struggles with in this book. Ellie's medical struggles are in fact largely based on what Schreiber herself has gone through. This book definitely provides a voice to those experiencing serious illnesses, especially those which are invisible.

This book was a 10 out of 10 for me. I loved every second of it.

As for the narrator (I received the audiobook version), Natalie Naudus did an excellent job. I felt like her voice perfectly matched Ellie's personality. I will definitely be looking into more books narrated by her.… (meer)

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

Let me start by saying that the premise of this book was good. The world needs more books, especially YA books, featuring characters with disabilities.

BUT that being said, the execution of the story and character development fell flat a bit for me. I found Ellie to be wildly unlikeable. I was mostly just annoyed and at some moments angry at her rather than being able to empathize with her or relate to her - and this is coming from someone with chronic health issues (albeit not nearly as severe as hers)! Even trying to imagine myself as a teenager again with a teenage brain, I still couldn't relate to her ways of approaching the world and relationships.

I will say that the saving grace was Ellie's feelings towards her mother's "mommy blog" about Ellie's life and struggles. I grew up well before the mommy blog trend, but I can imagine that growing up having all of your medical issues and personal life put on the internet without your consent and control would cause a lot of distress. I think that as the current generation grows up to realize that so-called influencers have been posting about them online since they were infants, I think this is an important and relevant topic to bring up and write about it.

A quick read, and overall I'd recommend for teens looking for a books about characters' experiences living with disabilities.… (meer)

Ellie Haycock is straddling two worlds and not very successfully. As a teenager with VACTERL syndrome, hospitals and surgeries have become, if not a normal part of her life, then a very common occurrence. When she's not having surgeries to correct the disease's many debilitating effects, she wants to live as normal a life as possible - hanging out with her boyfriend Jack, her friend Brooke, winning speech competitions and dreaming of being an actress. Unfortunately, a mysterious lung ailment has her back in the hospital's Family Home among the typically temporary friendships there, contemplating another scary surgery that may (or may not) be what gets her back to her "real" life. What's more terrifying than another surgery, though, is when Ellie's desperate attempts to keep her two lives separate, sheltering her "normal" friends from the cruel realities of her disability and eagerly leaving behind her "hospital" friends in between surgeries threaten to alienate everyone she loves.

Ellie is a vivid, if occasionally frustrating, narrator. Faced with her "normal" friends during her hospital time, she can't bear to share even the smallest tidbit of what she's going through. Instead, she quickly makes a group of hospital friends, including Caitlin, another teen with VACTERLs, Luis with the "little c" cancer, an overly chipper volunteer named Veronica, and prickly Ryan Kim who changes her perspective and maybe...her heart? The unique setting makes fast friendships and perhaps even some romance more believable than they would otherwise be.

This book gives readers an inside look into the struggle of being a constant patient without ever having the luxury of being able to hope to leave the hospital cured. Ellie's frustration with the constant swing of the pendulum between what she considers her to be her real life and her life in the hospital is palpable. Additionally, her mother is one of those parents who shares her whole life story via a blog, that as she grows older, feels more and more invasive. If you've ever seen a blog/Facebook page/Instagram, etc. featuring a very sick or disabled kid and wondered how weird it would be to be that kid, this book is for you.

Ellie Haycock is Totally Normal is an excellent coming of age book with a welcome unique perspective on disability that mingles tough topics like medical autonomy, not being heard by doctors, and privacy with the more typical page-turning stuff of romance and friendship drama. At times it felt like everything was happening a little too quickly, Ellie was a little too obtuse about reality, and the dialogue had a tendency to reference thoughts that were more implied than actually written which left me feeling occasionally like I'd missed something. In the end, though, I was touched by Ellie's discovery that all her lives add up to just one and that there is healing to be found in letting people in.… (meer)