Horn Book (Mon Apr 01 00:00:00 CDT 2013)

Following a mountain biking accident, West finds himself in a hospital bed, paralyzed and able to communicate only with Olivia, the enigmatic girl in the room next to his. When he recovers, he must redefine everything he thought he knew about Olivia. The slow pace and claustrophobic atmosphere mar an otherwise powerful, spooky, and surreal parapsychological drama.

Kirkus Reviews

A medical thriller offers a twist that will have readers questioning reality alongside its narrator. A young man wakes up strapped to a hospital bed, unable to speak or, initially, to move. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, the details of his former life are revealed in flashbacks, dreams and conversations (he blinks and writes on a board to communicate) with a fellow patient, Olivia. His name is West, and at age 17 he was a talented dirt-bike racer until an accident left him paralyzed. Through the excruciatingly long days of his recovery, West falls in love with the knowing, sarcastic Olivia even as he acknowledges the depths of her dark side and its root cause--her irreversible ill health. As West considers whether to participate in an experimental surgery that could either kill him or let him walk again, he finds himself at odds with Olivia, who has mysteriously strong feelings of her own about the risks. Although the first-person narration lags a bit in the middle, the last third of the novel is both briskly paced and increasingly eerie as West begins to realize that things are not as they seem. This outing is a marked departure from Busby's Date Him or Dump Him series; the twists and turns of West's relationship with Olivia provide a cloudier and more satisfying kind of suspense. (Thriller. 12-17)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Busby's novel works both as an atmospheric mystery and a realistic portrayal of what trauma patients and their loved ones face during hospitalization. When 17-year-old West wakes up in a hospital, a neighboring patient his age, Olivia, tells him that he has been in a mountain biking accident and is paralyzed ("Sorry if you didn't already know. I'm sure you're bummed"). Using blinks-"once for yes and twice for no"-and then a whiteboard, West starts to communicate with Olivia, an intense, unpredictable girl. As their relationship turns romantic, Olivia warns West against an experimental surgery his family has scheduled, and West is simultaneously unsettled by recurring dreams about a violent man that he thinks are "trying to tell me something.... Something about this hospital, this room." Readers will race to the end of this moody, surreal book from Busby (who collaborated with her father on The Year We Disappeared) to unravel the mystery behind West's dreams and his strange connection to Olivia. They won't be disappointed by what they discover. Ages 14-up. Agent: Brenda Bowen, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. (Sept.)