What's it all about?

Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern

The story opens with an unsent email message, “you want the whole story, but you don’t realize - it’s impossible to tell the whole story.  You probably think it was all about sex, but that’s where you’re wrong.”

The action of the story begins many months before this email is written.  It’s intended to draw us into the story, and it feels contrived.

Basic story line: it’s senior year for Amy and her mother wants her to have a “normal” year. It turns out that Amy has cystic fibrosis, is in a wheelchair, and uses a device for speaking.  Her mother is recruits a team of paid peer helpers that will push Amy’s wheelchair from class to class, eat lunch with her, and introduce her to new friends.  One of her new student helpers is Matthew, but only because Amy convinces her mother to choose him for her team of 5. While Amy is a very talented student, Matthew is not and, his OCD constantly interferes with his school and social life.  What follows is the story of Matthew and Amy’s senior year and how they deal with their respective “disabilities”.  It’s probably no surprise that Amy deals with her challenges better than Matthew does with his.

The story takes a weird turn when Amy has sex with one of her peer-helpers (not Matthew) and ends up pregnant.  By this time, she and Matthew are in love with each other, but they are afraid to admit it to each other. Amy has to decide what to do about the baby and what to do about the big plans she and her parents have for her life after high school.

There are elements in this novel that require a leap of faith: allowing paid “peer helpers” to take Amy around instead of trained aides, that Amy would have sex with one of her peer helpers, that her parents would send her off to Stanford University 6 hours away from home, and that she would try to hide her pregnancy from her parents by coming home and living with her old Physics teacher.  

I really had to look for things to like about this book.  I liked the premise of a challenged teen learning to be more independent so she could go off to college, but the pregnancy seemed manufactured to keep us reading. The characters were not particularly empathetic, and the action was slow. I think the book would have been better if it had focused only on Amy and Matthew’s relationship and how they dealt with becoming more independent. I loved the idea that Amy would consider going off to live on her own, but by the time we finally got to that, I’d kind of lost interest.