Confessions of a Teenage Leper by Ashley Little
Publication Date: September 25th, 2018
Publisher: Penguin Teen
Abby Furlowe has plans. Big plans. She's hot, she's popular, she's a cheerleader and she's going to break out of her small Texas town and make it big. Fame and fortune, adoration and accolades. It'll all be hers.
But then she notices some spots on her skin. She writes them off as a rash, but things only get worse. She's tired all the time, her hands and feet are numb and her face starts to look like day-old pizza. By the time her seventeenth birthday rolls around, she's tried every cream and medication the doctors have thrown at her, but nothing works. When she falls doing a routine cheerleading stunt and slips into a coma, her mystery illness goes into overdrive and finally gets diagnosed: Hansen's Disease, aka leprosy.
Abby is sent to a facility to recover and deal with this new reality. Her many misdiagnoses mean that some permanent damage has been done, and all of her plans suddenly come tumbling down. If she can't even wear high heels anymore, what is the point of living? Cheerleading is out the window, and she might not even make it to prom. PROM!
But it's during this recovery that Abby has to learn to live with something even more difficult than Hansen's Disease. She's becoming aware of who she really was before and what her behavior was doing to others; now she's on the other side of the fence looking in, and she doesn't like what she sees. . .
This sounds like your classic story where the mean girl goes through something traumatic but then realizes that there is more to life than being popular, beautiful, and mean. But the diagnosis of Leprosy is what intrigues me to want to read it anyway. That angle alone was enough for me to try it out.
Although not a new concept, I am still looking forward to reading Confessions of a Teenage Leper.
What book are you waiting on this week?
Waiting On Wednesday is a weekly event hosted at Breaking The Spine.
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