HEARTBREAK AND OTHER ORGAN FAILURES

Kaley's world is kinda, sorta right on the verge of falling apart. Her boyfriend's just moved to college, and even a month in, long-distance is proving... challenging. Her mother's a stress case, juggling being a single mom while caring for Kaley's older sister Zoey, whom Kaley loves more than anyone in the world and who was born with severe developmental disabilities. Her father's not answering anybody's calls, and Zoey herself is... medically fragile. Like, she needs a new kidney now, and because of her disabilities, she's on the bottom of the transplant list.

Kaley needs Zoey to be well not just because she adores Zoey. Kaley needs Zoey to be well so she can head off to an out-of-state college without any guilt. If Zoey were better (or, you know, not in the hospital every other day for dialysis), leaving to pursue her own life would be easier for Kaley. And she could fix things with her boyfriend. They'll fall deeper in love, get married, have kids of their own...

When Kaley's mom finds out she isn't a match for kidney donation, Kaley knows what she has to do: track down her father to the remote cabin where he lives as a park ranger. He'll be a match, she knows, and if she turns up, he can't avoid her calls. Plus, he's not that far from the college her boyfriend's attending. But when her mom hears of Kaley's plan (the dad part, not the impromptu boyfriend visit), she decides it's going to be a girls' trip after all. Which is a lot more time and tension in the car than Kaley bargained for.

THOUGHTS

This book is everything you could want from a coming-of-age story. It's growing pains. It's family ties. It's hopes and dreams and the constraints of reality. It's learning to be independent while remembering how much you love the people who have raised you (even when that's difficult). It's not a new story. It's not a unique story. It's not a story with twists that will surprise you. But it does exactly what it sets out to do, and I can admire that.

PROS

Serious Sibling	It would have been very easy to make Zoey just a stock character. In fact, a lot of siblings in YA end up as stock characters, ways to fill out the main characters backstory or prop up a plot in some way. It is even easier to do that with a developmentally disabled character like Zoey. She could have so easily been reduced to her disability, to the way her presence in Kaley's life affected Kaley's worldview and opportunities. And I am very grateful that is very much not the case here. Zoey is a character that stands on her own. She's a complex character, with her own thoughts and hopes and dreams (even if those look different on the page than Kaley's). She's not just a part of Kaley's backstory. She's Kaley's closest friend, her confidante, her big sister. And I love that. I love how seriously Zoey is taken as a character and how lovingly she is portrayed on the page. I didn't expect it at all, and I was so delighted.

Messy	This isn't a simplistic depiction of life with a disabled sibling, either. Zoey is delightful, and she's challenging. She's challenging to live with, to grow up with, to plan a future around. And this book doesn't gloss around that, even making Zoey as delightful as she is. Kaley's life hasn't been like the lives of her classmates. She's used to a lot more doctor visits, and she's used to a lot less parental bandwidth. And she's used to plotting her future around the very real constraints of Zoey's future, of where Zoey could end up and what she needs to live a good life. Kaley loves her sister, and though her sister isn't her responsibility, she knows that she will one day step up to take responsibility for her sister. Because that's who Kaley is, too. And that's hard. That's a really hard reality to wrestle with, especially as a seventeen-year-old girl looking at college and what life could be. It's a lot of heavy responsibility, and it's a lot of consideration other kids your age don't have to take and definitely don't understand. It's a hard spot, and I appreciate how this book wrestles with those tensions in Kaley's life.

Nuanced	It isn't just Kaley's relationship with her sister that's handled with incredible nuance. It's Kaley's relationships more generally. Her relationship with her boyfriend is messy, too. It's messy because they're figuring out long-distance, and they both want to make it work (even when it hurts). And it's messy because they both care about each other so much, even when they don't quite fit with each other as well as they would hope. And it's messy because their hopes and dreams align, and they also don't. Her relationship with her father is even messier. He left the family years ago, but he's supported them as much as he can from afar. He won't return their texts, but they trust that he'll donate a kidney if he's a match. He loves them, she thinks, and it's hard for her to see that love. It's messy. It's real. And meeting him, digging into the how and the why... that's messier still, but I'm not giving any spoilers! Just know that all these messy entanglements take relationships that could be black-and-white (especially in YA) and make them multi-faceted, hard to explain and incredibly real in a way I really appreciate.

CONS

The one thing I wish we had lingered on a bit more was, you know, the fallout of the relationship troubles Kaley has with her boyfriend. I don't want to spoil anything about where the plot takes her and her romantic relationship (and rest assured, it is not a cut-and-dry representation, as I've indicated above). But there's such a hard breaking point that it reaches, and the resolution, the release from this building tension, just isn't as nuanced as I would have liked for a book otherwise so nuanced. I don't mind the end point, but I wish we had wrestled a bit more in the breaking-down of what happened, you know?	Relationship Blues

Kaley puts a lot of responsibility on her shoulders, which is honestly more than a girl her age should carry, regardless of how much she loves her sister. But it is realistic that she would feel this way. What makes it harder to read are the expectations placed on her by her mother. Those expectations aren't as many or as much as I feared they would be going into this book (which, thank goodness), but they're still... a lot. As much as Kaley loves Zoey, Kaley is still an independent person with her own life ahead of her. And that, I fear, just isn't acknowledged enough. She makes sacrifices for Zoey, and she's willing to continue to do so. But for any parental figure in her life to expect her to sacrifice in this way? Well, I don't think that's good for Kaley's own growth, and a parent can't just be doing good by one of their kids. It's not right. She needs a parent who is squarely in her corner, and it was sad to see she didn't quite have that.	Too Much

You don't come into a book like this thinking it's going to be full of sharp twists and turns. It's not a thriller, after all. But if you're someone who needs some sort of surprise to come along in the plot, this book might not be for you. The complicated family dynamics of this coming-of-age story will be enough for a lot of readers, but there aren't any real surprises, no unexpected turns this plot veers into, and for some, that will be a bit of a let-down.	No Twists

Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
7/10

Fans of Elise Bryant's Happily Ever Afters will like this new story of a girl figuring out what she wants from life. Those who loved the messy, real-life conversations of Jen Ferguson's A Constellation of Minor Bears will love this bittersweet taste of reality.

Details
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Date: August 4, 2026
Series: N/A
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Note: I was provided with an ARC by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.

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