This is my post during the blog tour for Life and Other Complications by Heather Mullaly.
Life and Other Complications is a new young adult contemporary book by Heather Mullaly in which a 17 year old girl can't bring herself to tell her friends the truth about how she contracted HIV so she writes to the one person who might understand, a girl she's never met.
This blog tour is organized by Lola's Blog Tours and runs from 5 till 18 July. See the tour schedule here.
Author: Heather Mullaly Blurb
Seventeen-year-old Aly Bennett has been in love with her friend Luke for years. She hasn't told him how she feels for two reasons. 1) She's the girl with HIV. 2) She lied about how she got it.
Aly never meant to lie. The words just slipped out on her first day of a support group for kids living with life-threatening conditions. It was the day she met Luke and Caroline, who would become her best friends and the closest thing she has to a family. After so many years, Aly doesn’t know how to tell her friends the truth. So she paints and she runs and she tries not to think about the future she can’t have.
But when a Boston prosecutor asks Aly to testify in a trial—and her relationship with Luke intensifies—things become complicated. If she testifies, Luke and Caroline will learn the truth—that Aly has been lying to them for most of a decade. If she doesn’t, a monster could go free, again.
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Excerpt
When we first moved to Trinity, Mrs. Miller hadn’t planned to tell anyone that I have HIV. But my social worker insisted that she tell my school. Even then, my HIV-positive status was only supposed to be shared with the staff who needed to know. But my third-grade teacher confided in her sister, who told her best friend. Within two days, the whole town knew.
My classmates’ parents all said it was fine, that it wouldn’t be a problem. But they didn’t want their kids sitting next to me in class or playing with me on the playground. Apparently, I looked like the kind of eight-year-old who might bleed spontaneously or start up a brothel in the reading corner.
One whispered secret and I was treated like a leper, while Mrs. Miller was elevated to the status of sainthood.
“You are so good to take her in,” the women at church told her.
And Mrs. Miller always said, “We all have to do what we can.”
It was one of those church members who suggested that I would benefit from the Children Living with Life Threatening Conditions Support Group at the regional hospital. I didn’t want to go. But Mrs. Miller didn’t care. She was now playing the part of the devoted parent of a sick child, and sick children belonged in this group.
It didn’t turn out that badly. Because on my first day of Group, I met Luke and Caroline.
Caroline’s leukemia went into remission two years ago, and she dropped out of Group. (She likes to say that she flunked dying). But Luke and I are still here, and he drives me out to the hospital every Thursday afternoon after school.
The three of us met in the kids’ group. But at age 13, you move up to the Teens Living with Life Threatening Conditions Support Group. The chairs are taller for the teen version and the language is harsher. But otherwise, it’s the same. Kids still look like they’ve been blindsided the first time they come through the door. You don’t have to be terminal to end up here, but something has to be working pretty hard to kill you. And you see it in their eyes, that hunted, desperate look.
If they last long enough, the new kids make it through what we call the three stages: crying uncontrollably, breaking things, and finally laughter. I guess that’s our version of acceptance, when you can laugh at the thing that’s trying to end you.
About the Author
Heather Mullaly is a passionate believer in the power of story. When she isn’t writing them, reading them, or listening to them, she can usually be found baking something that involves chocolate, thinking up new story ideas before she’s finished the two she’s currently writing, or hanging out with her family, who happen to be even more fantastic than the characters in her head. She lives in Virginia with her husband and their three teenagers.
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There is a tour wide giveaway for the blog tour of Life and Other Complications. Three winners will win an $10 Amazon gift card.
For a chance to win, enter the rafflecopter below
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