An Eighteen-Year-Old with a Fatal Illness
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This book is set in the mid 1970’s and has a compelling premise – Maggie and Chip are brother and sister. They are only a year apart in age and have always been very close, Frick and Frack as their mother would say. But what happens to them – individually and together – when he becomes ill and dies while still a teenager? Enquiring minds want to know, right? And that’s exactly how I got pulled into the book.
To those very bare bones of a storyline, let me add this…
Chip is eighteen and a senior in high school when he gets sick. As doctors start to talk about months and not years, and as they tell him the side effects of treating his illness – total hair loss, fatigue, diarrhea, headaches, and nausea, Chip decides that such treatment is an unwise way to spend his last days.
So, after attending his high school graduation, which he did for his parents’ sake, he does something for himself. He leaves home without telling anyone his whereabouts and goes to work at a resort in the Poconos (about a 45-minute bus ride from his home in Easton, Pennsylvania) where no one will know his situation and where he can live life as a normal teenager as opposed to the sick son and brother that he is in Easton.
At summer’s end, he returns home where he ultimately dies.
This, of course, sends Maggie into a tailspin. By the time a year passes and she graduates from high school, she has figured out where Chip had gone for his last summer – the Red Maple Inn – and follows his footsteps. This was her thought: “Maybe the people there could tell her about who, in his last good moments, her brother had been.”
All of this tugged at my heartstrings, and I was like Maggie. I wanted to know what Chip’s last summer was like. So I read on…
But then I was disappointed because I didn’t think the author added enough meat to the bare bones of the compelling storyline. There was not enough character development for me. And though I usually do not like a lot of information on the setting, this book had almost none. I really wanted to know what the Red Maple Inn was like.
Having given two negatives about the book, I will close with two positives – The Catcher in the Rye and The Velveteen Rabbit. Both books have roles in this story. Chip has always loved The Velveteen Rabbit and Maggie reads it to him repeatedly as his life ends. And in his Red Maple days, he was reading The Catcher in the Rye, but he was reading it slowly because he did not want it to end.
Chip being stuck between his childhood and his coming of age is the sort of poignancy I had hoped for throughout the book. I was glad to get a taste of it here.
I need to say that I was offered a review copy of this book in return for an honest review and this is it. Additionally, when I look at other reviews online by other folks with this same perk, I see that most gave it a great review. So perhaps it is reviewer error and not author error at fault here.
The book will be released on June 30, 2026.
Let me know what you think if you give it a try.
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If you like my writing, I hope you will check out my new book, Chai on Life. It contains 36 slice-of-life stories ranging in topics from belly fat to Billy Joel. It is available wherever books are sold and on Amazon. There is even a companion journal for you to write the stories of your life.
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