Five Feet Apart is a great book written by Mikki Daughtry, Rachael Lippincott, and Tobias Iaconis. It is a coming of age romance story similar to The Fault in Our Stars. It was a pretty good book. I had already seen the movie before reading it, but, like always, the book was much better.
Five Feet Apart centers around a girl named Stella who has cystic fibrosis, which is a disease that affects your lungs. While at the hospital for monitoring, she meets Will. He is the classic bad boy, the “you only live once” type. You can’t blame him though, he not only has cystic fibrosis, he also has Burkholderia cepacia, which is basically a death sentence.
The two of them meet at the hospital when Stella, our hyper-organized-wants-to keep-living protagonist, sees Will skip his vital treatments. Not only is he basically trying to die, he is one of the few patients on a special new experimental drug. Therefore, he is eliminating someone else’s chance for living too. Naturally, Stella is pissed about that so she doesn’t like him. Will, however, think she’s hot and interesting. The two of them officially meet and it’s a disaster. It’s so bad in fact that she gets him in trouble.
Given the fact that Stella has been going to the same hospital for all of her life, she’s made a few friends there. In fact, her best friend, Poe, is a permanent resident at the hospital. Poe is a Colombian soccer-loving aspiring chef. In my opinion, he’s by far the best character in the book. Anyways, Stella complains about Will to Poe (which let’s all be real, sometimes we complain about people to our best friends). The two of them talk it out, and Stella gives Will a chance.
Eventually, Stella and Will make a deal. She will talk to him if he does his medication every day. Over time, they start to fall for each other. Cystic fibrosis is a serious illness that leads to the death of most patients, unless they get new lungs. To prevent infections and an even higher chance of death, patients with CF have to stay at least 6 feet from each other at all times. The two lovebirds hate that rule because they can never get physically close to each other. So, they modify the rule. They steal back a foot, making them FIVE feet apart. Get the title now?
As the book moves along, Stella and Will get caught together and their nurse, Nurse Barb, is NOT happy about that. She had seen couples like them before and they always ended in death. In her attempts to keep the two of them apart, they only grow closer.
Then, it’s Will’s birthday! Yay! Stella sets up a scavenger hunt for him around the hospital, ending in a big dinner with her, Poe and two of his friends. Poe makes an amazing dinner and an astounding cake that everyone loves. And it’s all going great, right? How could this perfect moment possibly be ruined? Oh wait, we forgot about Nurse Barb. She crashes their party and everyone is sent back to their respective rooms for the night.
Suddenly, Stella hears the blaring emergency alarm. As she swarms around in panic, she learns that it was Poe’s room setting off the alarm. His heart had stopped. Much to my dismay and my tears, Poe died that night. It was awful. The worst part was that Stella, in all her sadness and fury, threw the glass jar of black truffles that Poe had given her into the wall, smashing it into pieces. Personally, I hate this part of the book because I loved Poe.
After that, Stella goes kinda crazy. She becomes reckless and runs outside, taking Will with her. She wanted to go look at the holiday lights with the guy she liked. Stella broke tons of rules and was buried deep in her sorrow, when she got the text. New lungs had arrived for her. New lungs meant a new life, meant she could live a little before she died. But it also meant that she was living when Poe was not. Stella ignored the texts and calls. She then had the bright idea to go on the iced over lake. On the lake, Will learns about the lungs and wants to get her to the hospital immediately. She did not want to go though and whilst they were talking, the ice under Stella broke and she went plunging into the freezing water. Will jumps in to save her, and once he pulls her out of the water, he noticed that she wasn’t breathing. Willm performs CPR on her, knowing that he would probably give her b. cepacia and ruin her chances at the new lungs. After that, he calls Nurse Barb and they get back to the hospital.
Stella gets her new lungs, and as she was looking for Will in her room, she realized that he wasn’t there. She gets a call on her phone from him to look out the window. There he was, standing in front of holiday lights just like she wanted. He told her that he had to leave for her, to protect her. The two of them share a heartfelt goodbye and Will disappears.
Fast forward to the epilogue, we see Stella traveling the world and who’s that in the airport. Oh my, it’s Will!!
This book almost made me cry, mainly the part about Poe to be honest. It’s a pretty cheesy book, but overall it’s very good. I recommend this book if you like the book The Fault in Our Stars or just any young romance novel.
Five Feet Apart by Mikki Daughtry, Rachael Lippincott, and Tobias Iaconis is available to checkout from the Mission Viejo Library. It is also available to download for free from Libby.