Advance Review of Robyn Schneider's Extraordinary Means
Release Date: May 26th, 2015
Synopsis as found on Amazon.com:
John Green's The Fault in Our Stars meets Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park in this darkly funny novel from the critically acclaimed author of The Beginning of Everything.
Up until his diagnosis, Lane lived a fairly predictable life. But when he finds himself at a tuberculosis sanatorium called Latham House, he discovers an insular world with paradoxical rules, med sensors, and an eccentric yet utterly compelling confidante named Sadie—and life as Lane knows it will never be the same.
Robyn Schneider's Extraordinary Means is a heart-wrenching yet ultimately hopeful story about the miracles of first love and second chances.
Synopsis as found on GoodReads.com:
From the author of The Beginning of Everything: two teens with a deadly disease fall in love on the brink of a cure.
At seventeen, overachieving Lane finds himself at Latham House, a sanatorium for teens suffering from an incurable strain of tuberculosis. Part hospital and part boarding school, Latham is a place of endless rules and confusing rituals, where it's easier to fail breakfast than it is to flunk French.
There, Lane encounters a girl he knew years ago. Instead of the shy loner he remembers, Sadie has transformed. At Latham, she is sarcastic, fearless, and utterly compelling. Her friends, a group of eccentric troublemakers, fascinate Lane, who has never stepped out of bounds his whole life. And as he gradually becomes one of them, Sadie shows him their secrets: how to steal internet, how to sneak into town, and how to disable the med sensors they must wear at all times.
But there are consequences to having secrets, particularly at Latham House. And as Lane and Sadie begin to fall in love and their group begins to fall sicker, their insular world threatens to come crashing down. Told in alternating points of view, Extraordinary Means is a darkly funny story about doomed friendships, first love, and the rare miracle of second chances.
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Excerpt from Extraordinary Means:
I could almost imagine that we were at camp. That we'd pull a prank on the counselors and toast s'mores at the campfire. That we'd go home tanned, our clothes smelling of bug spray. That we'd go home.
But it was possible not all of us would. Four out of five residents returned home from Latham House. That fact was in the brochure, and it was part of all this that had struck me the most deeply. Deeper than the day I'd fainted in phys ed from the cardio conditioning sprints and wound up in the ER in my embarrassingly unwashed gray jersey gym set. Deeper than how Dr. Crane had gotten my test results and, staring straight through me, had said, "There is an active case of tuberculosis," a sentence hauntingly absent of a pronoun. Like, I had once been there, but my personhood was now irrelevant, because when anyone looked at me from that moment on, all they would see was a grim and incurable disease.
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I am not usually one to pick up regular old Teen Fiction, unless a friend tells me I just have to read it: For example, The Fault In Our Stars. I was looking for a change from my regular picks and when I read the synopsis for Extraordinary Means, I decided to give it a try. I have a love/hate relationship with books that make me cry. On the one hand, I love it when a book can make me care about a character so deeply and then rip them away, thus making me cry with exclamations of "How Could You?" and "Why Them?" While on the other hand... WHY?
I am very in love with Schneider's writing style. And while, this book may be out of my genre of preferred reading, it does bring a new genre to my eyes. While I didn't read Eleanor & Park, I did read The Fault In Our Stars. I could definitely see similarities in both TFIOS & Extraordinary Means, but in my eyes, the similarities end at the terminally ill kids.
EM is about love and loss... about chance encounters and making new friends... and above all else, it is about making every moment count, because it might just be your last. I felt every loss like it was my own and wept with the characters when they were mourning a friend. My one and only complaint is that the book wasn't long enough and the ending was very definitive... leaving no room for a sequel. I with I could ask Schneider about her characters... where they are now? If they are still friends? Do they find love after all of that loss? And of course... WHY?
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