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.”