Rowena’s review of Someone Else’s Life by Katie Dale.
Main Character: Rosie
Love Interest: ??
Series: None
Author: Facebook|Twitter|Goodreads
When 17-year-old Rosie’s mother, Trudie, dies from Huntington’s Disease, her pain is intensified by the knowledge that she has a fifty percent chance of inheriting the crippling disease herself. Only when Rosie tells her mother’s best friend, “Aunt Sarah,” that she is going to test for the disease does Sarah, a midwife, reveal that Trudie wasn’t her real mother after all. Rosie was swapped at birth with a sickly baby who was destined to die.
Devastated, Rosie decides to trace her real mother, joining her ex-boyfriend on his gap year travels, to find her birth mother in California. But all does not go as planned. As Rosie discovers yet more of her family’s deeply buried secrets and lies, she is left with an agonizing decision of her own, one which will be the most heart breaking and far-reaching of all.
I wanted to read this book because it sounded like something I could really get into. Grief, missing loved ones, I’ve recently been through that and I can easily connect with characters that were going through the same thing but for some reason, I couldn’t connect with Rosie. I’m thinking because in the book she says that she loved her mother, Trudie more than everything and yet I didn’t really see it. You see, she finds out that her mother Trudie, the woman who raised her wasn’t really her mother, that she was switched at birth. She finds this out because Trudie died of Huntington’s disease and that’s hereditary so the nurse who swapped her (a dear friend of her mother and neighbor Sarah) had to finally fess up to what she did all those years ago because Rosie is scared to death that she has Huntington’s disease too.
I had a lot of issues with this book and my main gripe came from what Sarah did. I wasn’t happy with the way that her actions were kind of glossed over. I kept waiting for that whole fiasco to be dealt with and when it never was, I was disappointed and in turn, I kept getting thrown out of the story. I get that Rosie was delivered news that would have devastated anyone but she reacted like a child would react. I wasn’t a fan of hers throughout most of the book and my enjoyment of the book suffered because of it. When they went to New York and she kept her true reasons for going with Andy a secret, she got a mark on my crap list. When everything just sort of fell into crazyland, the way she reacted to it all, she got a mark on my crap list.
There was too much in this book that bothered me and because of that, this book was nearly a DNF for me. It just didn’t work for me. I couldn’t sympathize with Rosie, I didn’t buy the way that everything just fell together and for most of the book, I kept circling around to Sarah’s actions. I kept hoping that she would pay for her actions because you could get into some serious trouble for doing something like what she did in real life and yet, it wasn’t that big of a deal in the book- at least that’s how I took it from the way that story played out.
I went into this book wanting to like it, wanting to connect with the characters and while there were things that I enjoyed of the story, overall it was a big let down.
..and that’s your scoop!
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Book cover and blurb credit: http://barnesandnoble.com
The premises sound interesting… but at the same time, like you say, what Sarah did is really something very important with a lot of impact. And it should be dealt with.
Does she reunite with her real family?
Thanks for the review Rowena 🙂 guess i’ll be skipping this one.
Hey Nath!
Yeah, she reunites with her real family. I just wish that I could enjoyed this book more than I did because the premise did sound interesting but I just wasn’t a fan of the way the story played out.