Five Feet Apart Hardcover – November 20, 2018

Stella and Will fall in love in a hospital… both of them are slowly dying. It’s charming and painful and a brutal first love. Recommended.

I loved everything about this story. It was way too short unfortunately. I would have loved for the story to go on a little longer. Thank you to Rachael, Mikki and Tobias for a beautifully told story, it was un-put-down-able.

I saw the movie the day it came out and I literally came home and ordered the book. It took me a little longer than I’d have liked to read it, but it’s not a terribly long book, so it wasn’t too hard to binge the last third in like two hours.But yeah, I really liked this book.It ripped my heart to shreds and dropped my heart into a deep, terrible abyss of sadness and tears, but it was still beautiful. My only real complaint is that there are some parts of the book that are poorly written. Well, actually most of the book is pretty poorly written. I caught a number of sentences where it looked like the authors didn’t exactly know how to even format a sentence with the correct structure, which honestly kinda made me mad (major grammar nerd that I am), but overall I still really liked it.The story pretty much stayed 100% true to the movie, with a few extra scenes tossed in. But in the end, I’m glad I read it because sometimes you just want those beautifully heartbreaking scenes in ink, on paper, tucked away on your bookshelf for you to pull out anytime you wanna remember a beautiful story. ❤️In conclusion, you should go buy it right now or go see the movie cause they’re basically the same. But either way, go let yourself get swept away in Stella and Will’s story because while it’s definitely a mood story...it’s also a beautifully, painful story that not only spreads the word about cystic fibrosis, but makes you realize just how powerful every moment – and every inch – is.

I am torn here, wondering if the book lost some of its impact for me only because I had seen the movie first. And by "seen the movie" I mean devoured the movie, watched it all the way through twice and then again the next day before reluctantly returning the DVD (which I'll probably end up buying for myself). The book is the very same story, scene for scene, but the dialog lacks the snap, and the characters lack the depth and empathic pull without the visual and audial connection to their reactions and emotions that the movie gives us. I honestly don't think I would have believed the romance just from the book, despite having access to the characters' inner thoughts. Stella's YouTube blog was certainly more compelling in the movie -- you get a much better feel for her personality. And, oh my, the power of Will's rare smile in the movie! On the other hand, the book explained a few tiny nagging details to me. No, I am not OCD like Stella, but I dislike those unexplained little loose ends, like how could Will follow Stella to the NICU, what did the "rose" clue in the birthday treasure hunt mean, why can't Poe see his mom, etc. Plus the book adds levels of meaning to some gestures, especially (OMG, especially) the paper flower bouquet Will gives Stella. The book fills in these details and I treasure it for it. The book also explains CF and the treatments for CF better. Rarely do I prefer a movie over a book, but in this case, I advise, if you must pick one, to see the movie first. Then, by all means, read the book.

When choosing this book to read I thought it would be just like every other dying teen book I have read. It isn’t. There are so many themes and stories inside stories within this single story. I don’t want to say too much and give too much of the story away. There are losses and times of happy tears. There is selfishness and a total loss of the same. Cystic fibrosis is a terrible disease. You basically drown in your own mucus and at the same time you have to be careful of anyone, especially another person with CF, getting too close because even a simple cold can kill and bacterial infections can easily kill. 6feet is the recommended distance our main character takes back one foot of that for a chance to finally feel she has a life.I would recommend this book to adults and teens. Some scenes are too intense for many younger kids so parents should read an decide if their child is mature enough to handle those life and death themes.

A novel about teenagers with Cystic Fibrosis? When I was a teenager in the fifties, there was Ellen, a girl in my school who had “something wrong with her lungs”. I remember her coughing, sometimes breathing noisily and sitting on the bench when the rest of us had PE. I remember the adults whispering “So sad” and “She’ll die young”. We stayed away. Maybe death was infectious. Ellen died soon after I graduated. That’s when I found out that it was cystic fibrosis that killed her.Now 60 years later I read about Stella, Will and Poe, normal teenagers, except there is nothing normal about their lives. They are in a hospital struggling to stay alive. The center of the novel is a love story. Stella and Will fall in love for the first time in their lives and grapple with the fact that it can be fatally dangerous to touch each other. But it’s also a story about friendship and it’s these friendships that are deeply moving: the friendship between Stella and Poe, who have spent months and months of their lives in adjoining hospital rooms, between Stella and her friends Mya and Camilla, who come to plan for their senior trip, which Stella won’t be able to attend, between Will and his friends Jason and Hope, who get an hour of private time in Will’s hospital room, and finally between Poe and his friend and lover Michael, who Poe pushes away because he doesn’t want him to get hurt. These friendships are special because they have nothing to do with pitying a person with a fatal disease. They are friends because they are important to each other. I love the kids and their story and I hope that there never will be another Ellen, who is an outsider because people are afraid that she’ll die on them.