Can you love someone you can never touch?
Stella Grant likes to be in control—even though her totally out of control lungs have sent her in and out of the hospital most of her life. At this point, what Stella needs to control most is keeping herself away from anyone or anything that might pass along an infection and jeopardize the possibility of a lung transplant. Six feet apart. No exceptions.
The only thing Will Newman wants to be in control of is getting out of this hospital. He couldn’t care less about his treatments, or a fancy new clinical drug trial. Soon, he’ll turn eighteen and then he’ll be able to unplug all these machines and actually go see the world, not just its hospitals.
Will’s exactly what Stella needs to stay away from. If he so much as breathes on Stella she could lose her spot on the transplant list. Either one of them could die. The only way to stay alive is to stay apart. But suddenly six feet doesn’t feel like safety. It feels like punishment.
What if they could steal back just a little bit of the space their broken lungs have stolen from them? Would five feet apart really be so dangerous if it stops their hearts from breaking too?

What's worse than being a teenager, but spending most of your days in hospitals and scrolling through your social media, watching your friends on a trip you were supposed to go on? Or just sitting and thinking about it, counting your breaths, until the disease you’ve been fighting for years takes them away from you. Will and Stella are fighting cystic fibrosis (CF), a genetic disease that affects the lungs, since they were little kids. A few years ago, Will’s lungs got infected with bacteria B.cepacia, which only made things worse and destroyed his already slim chances of getting new lungs. Stella does everything to help her parents stop worrying, which is hard when they’ve just gotten divorced after her sister died. Cfers need to stay a safe six feet from each other at all times, so it won’t come to crossing-over of their diseases, but when Will and Stella start falling in love, those six feet start looking way too far.

When starting this book, I was hoping for a nice and cute romance novel, but all I got was a bad attempt at TFIOSing. The only reason I cared for reading it was that it raises awareness for a disease I haven’t heard of previously. The author had a pretty good idea, but unfortunately, there is a long way from a good idea to an inspiring book. I find it interesting to read about a disease where patients can’t stand closer to each other than six feet and it had a lot of potentials to become a sad-ish and slightly heartbreaking story, but when ran out of ideas, the author just turned to unnecessary drama and bad underdeveloped romance that made me want to dig my eyes out.

First of all, there is too much inconsistency in character development. Let’s go with Will. It’s bad enough that Lippincott started with a bad boy I-don’t-care-for-anyone-and-want-to-die trope, but also made her character FORGET his personality the moment he met the girl. Will is kind of sick of hospitals and can’t wait for his eighteenth birthday to get out of all treatments and travel the world instead of waiting for a cure that may never come. I can see why he thinks that and combined with his complicated relationship with his mother makes him an interesting character-except Lippincott decided to go all basic bad boy and added sarcasm, dark hair, and blue eyes. So Will hates his doctors and goes a long way to break as many rules as possible, but five minutes after he meets Stella, he gets all swoony eyed and starts shoving pills down his throat. How about no?

Stella is a complete control freak and does everything she is told to do. She loves her parents and does everything to in order to save her lungs, which is kind of controversial since she feels like they shouldn’t go through the process of losing another child. I actually think this is a pretty dumb reason to make a character feel guilty – because her sister died while bungee-jumping, while she stayed at home because she was SICK. And now she feels like it’s her fault Abby died because she wasn’t there? Basically, Stella feels obliged to live, so her parents won’t get even worse than they are now. Well, if we put that aside, there is again, a problem of Stella FORGETTING her personality after falling for Will, and *spoiler* deciding she doesn’t want her lungs after all and she’d rather die hugging Will or something. Nice. It was also totally realistic how devastated she was after Poe died, but forgot about him 10 minutes later.

So, yeah, sorry for the rant, but I was completely and utterly disappointed with this book. I’d like to watch the movie only because Cole Sprouse is acting.