“Side Effects May Vary” by Julie Murphy | Book Review

Murphy, Julie. Side Effects May Vary. New York: Balzer & Bray (Harper), 2014.

Genre: Contemporary

Recommended Audience: 16 and up

Personal reaction to the book

In this novel, sixteen-year-old Alice is living under the impression that she’s going to die from terminal cancer. To live it up in her final days, she recruits her friend Harvey to get pay back and revenge for all the people who’ve wronged her. Harvey, a good-natured guy, goes along with most things believing that Alice is in love with him and that they would have a future together if she were to live.

Side Effects May Vary by Julie Murphy
Side Effects May Vary by Julie Murphy

Well, Alice finds out she’s no longer terminal and is in complete remission, thereby causing awkward situations with Harvey and the people whose lives she ruined in revenge.

I felt that this novel was uneven. Some people on Goodreads liked that Alice was such a mostly rotten person, but I am in the camp who find her unsympathetic. Harvey was also a doormat, and that irritated me. I guess I just really can’t stand characters who are heartless and mean, and I really can’t stand characters who are wishy-washy and let people take advantage of them, so I didn’t have much to like in this book. I think it would be important to have in a library collection if only because it has enough similarities to The Fault in Our Stars that if someone was looking for a read-a-like and needed a darker version of a teenage cancer story they could find it with this novel.

Author Facts

Related Websites

Sarah S. Davis is the founder of Broke by Books, a blog about her journey as a schizoaffective disorder bipolar type writer and reader. Sarah's writing about books has appeared on Book Riot, Electric Literature, Kirkus Reviews, BookRags, PsychCentral, and more. She has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Library and Information Science from Clarion University, and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Total meltdown and raging emotions...yep, sounds like teen years
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