S.L. Huang is a speculative fiction writer, book-lover, and extreme nerd. Her debut novel, Zero Sum Game, and its sequel, Half Life, are about a snarky antiheroine who can do math really, really fast. You can find S.L. Huang on Twitter, where she talks mostly about things that have nothing to do with cancer. For the record, her lasting lament about the whole childhood cancer thing is that the radiation didn't give her superpowers.
Overall, I found the portrayal of pediatric cancer iffy—better than some, worse than others. Rather than unthinking stereotypes, though, these shortcomings felt like a result of a lack of personal experience or oversights in research.
Despite their proclamations to the contrary—“don’t tell me you’re one of those people who becomes their disease”—the characters are shown to have nothing in their lives that isn’t about their cancer.
“I learned absolutely nothing from Rachel’s leukemia,” this book’s protagonist starts off in its in-universe foreword, and I grinned and said, “YES! This is going to be good.”