She, Myself, and I

by Emma Young

Overview

Ever since Rosa’s nerve disease rendered her quadriplegic, she’s depended on her handsome, confident older brother to be her rock and her mirror. But when a doctor from Boston chooses her to be a candidate for an experimental brain transplant, she and her family move from London in search of a miracle. Sylvia—a girl from a small town in Massachusetts—is brain dead, and her parents have agreed to donate her body to give Rosa a new life. But when Rosa wakes from surgery, she can’t help but wonder, with increasing obsession, who Sylvia was and what her life was like. Her fascination with her new body and her desire to understand Sylvia prompt a road trip based on self-discovery... and a surprising new romance. But will Rosa be able to solve the dilemma of her identity?
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683351528
Publisher:	ABRAMS
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	830 KB

About the Author

Emma Young is an award-winning science/medicine journalist and author. Her work has been carried by CNN, the Week, and various newspapers and websites. Her books include the critically acclaimed middle-grade Storm series, as well as adult popular-science nonfiction. She lives in the United Kingdom with her husband and two children.

Editorial Reviews

"First-person narration increases the tension, and readers experience everything simultaneously with Rosa: from disgust at having co-opted someone else’s life, to doubt about whether her first love and sexual experience is about her or the dead girl whose body she wears...sympathy for Rosa and the bizarre situation she finds herself in will keep readers turning pages."

Booklist

"Like Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox (BCCB 4/08), the book prompts readers to wonder what makes human beings who they are—whether it is mind, body, or both—and to contemplate the impacts of innovative medical research and procedures."

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

" . . . the author does a nice job in developing the character and showing the emotional roller coaster that Rosa is on. Middle and high school girls will thoroughly enjoy this book."

School Library Connection

Rosa is in a hospital room anxiously awaiting ground-breaking surgery. Her body is so wasted with a rare nerve disease that she faces an early death. She and her family have decided she will undergo the first-ever brain transplant. Subsequently, she wakes up in the body of a girl who had been in an irreversible coma. Rosa progresses from being barely conscious to moving her limbs to escaping from the hospital to visit the park she has seen from her window. As Rosa is breathlessly taking in her surroundings, a young man asks for an interview. Scared, knowing she cannot reveal her true story, she drags herself back to her room. An hour later, she finds a note of apology from Joe, the would-be interviewer. Brain transplants happen only in fiction so far, and in reality, the survivor of such an operation, would probably not be able to take a weekend trip with a boyfriend just eight months later. But this novel is not about the science; it is about the immense adjustment to inhabiting someone else’s body. Through the voice of Rosa, the author makes this emotional journey seem real. Most wrenching of all is the issue of Rosa’s identity. Who is she, really? Her hands, her voice, her hair belonged to another girl. A visit to the donor’s hometown nearly overwhelms her. Vivid sensory detail adds immediacy as Rosa experiences—as though for the first time—the sights, smells, and sounds that surround her. Readers who are not distracted by the medical issues will find this an engrossing read. Reviewer: Marla Unruh; Ages 11 to 18.

VOYA, October 2017 (Vol. 40, No. 4) - Marla Unruh

09/01/2017
Gr 10 Up—Rosa is the first recipient of a full-body transplant: her brain in another girl's body. And while she's recovering, she can't help but wonder about her donor Sylvia This book's premise centers around the problematic "Miracle Cure" trope, in which a person with a disability is miraculously healed. Readers see very little of Rosa before her transplant (is the life of a quadriplegic teenager uninteresting?), and her physical recovery is similarly given short shrift in the text. While the psychological exploration of mind/body dualism proposed by the narrative could have been intriguing, instead, Rosa goes on a totally predictable road trip with a cute boy. Because of the lack of exploration of the life of a person with severe mobility impairment, the explicit disdain for ideas of medical ethics, and the clichéd YA romance, this is a book to pass on. VERDICT This title doesn't rise above its problematic premise, exploring clichéd romance instead of the depths of the world it proposes.—L. Lee Butler, Hart Middle School, Washington, DC

School Library Journal

2017-07-02
A disabled young woman gets her brain transplanted into the body of an attractive comatose donor.Rosa, an 18-year-old from London, has been disabled since childhood with an unnamed and vaguely defined terminal nerve disorder. When she gets the opportunity for a groundbreaking, secretive transplant surgery, her family rushes to America. Rosa knows almost nothing about her donor, Sylvia, except that she was a white 18-year-old like Rosa who's been in a coma since an accident. As Rosa recovers in rehab and builds a secretive romance with Joe, a tattooed white boy, she ponders the nature of her soul. With no rumination about the disability she's lived with for most of her life, her introspection lacks believability. Even while Rosa worries if Joe loves her or loves Sylvia's body, she never questions her conviction that in her prior body she'd been nonsexual, ineligible for romance. Rosa relies on her accent and her own mannerisms as identity-building evidence without exploring what it means that she retained them post-surgery. In a shocking and unexamined scene, Rosa and a fellow patient make a friendly date for hospital movie night to see Me Before You, a 2016 romance about a paralyzed man who chooses euthanasia over living disabled—a thoroughly inappropriate rehab-hospital film. A florid rumination on identity, utterly incurious about science, disability, or what makes life worth living. (Science fiction. 14-18)

Kirkus Reviews