She, Myself and I

She, Myself and I, follows the story of 18 year old Rosa as she undergoes a brain transplant. After a diagnosis at the age of seven, her body had started to deteriorate and she's on the verge of dying. Taking the brain transplant was a novel way of letting her survive. Even with an anonymity clause in the contract she signed, Rosa is still curious as to who was in this body before she was. So, she goes in search to find out more of the girl who's body she now uses, Sylvia.

This book can be quite intense and it led me to feeling a lot of emotions. However, I don't think the intensity was a bad thing. Instead, it brought across all of the feelings that Rosa was going through. How she was trying to find her identity again and trying to put a line between who she is and who Sylvia was.

I loved Rosa and the way she was written. How she got angry and annoyed with certain things and how her natural curiosity led her into a situation that, legally, she shouldn't have been in. I was thankful that this book was in her point of view as it did a lot more justice to her character. I don't think the book would have made sense had it not been.

I felt that there was a little bit of an incompleteness with the ending. I think there was some part of me that wanted a little more. Maybe an epilogue where we saw what Rosa's life was a couple of years after the brain transplant, Although, the book was still wrapped up in a pretty good way and it tied up any loose ends that might have been there for the reader.

Was the romance element of the book rushed a little bit? Possibly. I didn't feel like there was much development on that front, considering the two characters had only known each other a couple of day. I did find it hard not to fall in love with Joe's character though and he added quite a nice dynamic to the book,.

All in all, this book was a journey of self discovery for Rosa. She had spent so much of her life not being able to do what other kids her age were doing. She hadn't experienced a lot of the world in a way she wanted to. It was really beautiful to see her experience a lot of things for the first time in a long time as well as coming to terms with the new body she was in.

I would definitely recommend this book to any who's looking for a heartwarming read with a few twists along the way.

We spend our whole lives unintentionally committing ourselves to memory. We study the curve of our bodies, the shape of our faces, the dimple in our cheeks. that slightly crooked tooth or the moles we have dotted about our skin. We like some of them, so much so we probably wouldn’t give them up lightly, but others we might swap gladly. But whether we like what we see, or not, the person we see looking back at us in the mirror is who “me” is. So imagine, and really genuinely try to imagine, that the next time you look into that same mirror it’s like looking across a sink in a bathroom at a stranger washing their hands across from you. You don’t know the way their hair flops to one side all the time which gets on their nerves, you don’t know about that scar on their knee from when they fell off their bikes and you definitely don’t know what makes them “them”. Would you want to? Would you trade places? Would you still be “me” if your brain was in their body?

That’s pretty much Rosa’s dilemma now. Because after suffering from the age of seven from symptoms of a seriously damaging and debilitating nerve disease, Rosa has been selected for a breakthrough surgery which sees her brain being put into the head of another girls body. Sylvia.

The author of this book has so artfully handled some really mind blowing questions, largely about our identities to ourselves but also about how people identify us, or with us. There is so much more to us than the body we carry ourselves in.

I loved Rosa, her voice was the perfect blend of sarcasm, vulnerability and fight that I just love to read about. Her journey is pretty weird - I mean she’s going to find out about the dead girl whose body she’s so fortunate to live in (mind blowing again!). But the thought processes, questions and possibilities of such a thing are what makes this book so brilliant.

This is a book about identity.. But it is also so much more than that. An easy book to recommend.