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.
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
- Murphy considers the last line of a book to be harder to write than the first line.
- If Murphy were to be in a similar situation as Alice and have to come up with a bucket list, she would do more traveling and get more tattoos.
- Murphy wrote Side Effects May Vary during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 2011 and considers NaNoWriMo to be “the Ironman Triathalon of writing.“
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