Helen Rena

It was a great book. I bought it on the strength of its lovely cover and intriguing description, which in my paraphrase goes something like this: every morning A wakes up in a new body, and he is okay with this until he meets a girl and realizes that he wants to be with her every day.

The book has an unusual plot, and I enjoyed reading it apart from one problem, for which I didn’t take any stars off because...well, you’ll see. So, here’s the problem: A falls in love with a girl named Rhiannon because she looks sad. On the surface, this fact might sound innocent enough, but when you place it into the long-standing cultural tradition of idealizing frail and sick women, it looks much sadder. Here are a few pictures from the said tradition:

Carl Larsson, “The Invalid”

Leopoldo Romanach, “The Convalescent”

Louis Ridel, “Last Flowers”

In recent examples of YA lit, female characters are more often klutzy rather than fragile, as it happens for instance in Twilight. But sometimes they are also outright sick (The Fault in Our Stars, Me, Earl and the Dying Girl ). So I suppose Rhiannon is lucky to get away with just sadness rather than cancer. :) And also, that’s why I didn’t take any stars off.