Review: Someone Else's Life

Someone Else's Life
Katie Dale
Delacorte Books for Young Readers
February 14, 2012

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.

Someone Else's Life was..intense beyond all else. In a good way. It was such a roller coaster. There were surprises and twists around every corner. Even when I thought I knew what was going to happen, I would still be surprised. 

This book read like a soap opera (or what I imagine a soap opera would be like since I've never actually seen one). It was very dramatic and intense. Even though I felt that a lot of times it was too overdone and too dramatic, it was still very addicting and I couldn't get enough. It was definitely a guilty pleasure kind of book.

As stated, this book was almost too intense. There was just so much going on that at times I felt that I just needed a breather. But at the same time I was addicted and just had to keep going. 

There are to main characters in this book, Holly and Rosie. They were both selfish and, after everything they were going through, I couldn't blame them in the least. I did, however, like Rosie better than Holly. Holly was a bit immature and irrational at times. Again, it is still hard to blame her with everything that was going on. Both of them did grow over the course of the book. 

Someone Else's Life is intense and addicting. A guilty pleasure though and through.