Side Effects (review)

Isabelle, known as Izzy, is just a normal fourteen-year-old, balancing friends, crushes, schoolwork, and family, when her swollen glands turn out to be Hodgkin's lymphoma and she's plunged into a world of chemotherapy and hospitalization. This isn't a sentimental story of a beautiful young girl's losing the battle against disease, though: Izzy, like most kids with lymphoma, is cured by her treatment, and the book is pragmatically focused on her experience as a diversion from her ordinary life. It's utterly believable that that's Izzy's focus as well, and that she doesn't really address the possibility she might die until the chemotherapy is making her sick enough to consider the point; it's also believable that it hits people she knows differently, with her mother so grief-stricken she's an emotional liability, her best friend a loyal and sometimes overdefensive ally, and at least one classmate dramatizing the situation for her own purposes. The physical realities of treatment—the devastation that contrasts with the apparent wellness of merely having cancer—are described with sympathetic frankness, and Koss also effectively evokes the clubby intimacy between young cancer patients on the ward. Though the narrowness of the book's focus makes this a bit of a vivid documentary rather than a novel with a dimensional trajectory, it's a bracingly authentic account of a girl whose illness provides her with real-life age-appropriate obstacles rather than cathartic tragedy.