Side Effects May Vary by Julie Murphy

Published March 25, 2014 by Balzer+Bray

Alice has cancer. She knows she won’t be alive much longer, so she wants to make the most of it. Alice devises a bucket list of revenge and starts getting people back for the terrible things they’ve done to her. But after Alice has gone past the point of no return, she goes into remission; she is going to live to tell the tales. Alice must now live with what she’s done; all as she starts to see things in a new perspective. Julie Murphy’s debut novel is full of romance and not enough revenge for my liking.

My thoughts:

I have been pumped about this book for ages. I have a crush on the cover, the tagline, the synopsis and the author was out of this world nice when I met her. It disappoints me so much that book was not what I expected, and instead of serving up a dish of revenge, it served up a dish of complicated love shapes. The list and revenge were only about 5% of this book. 90% of this book was confusing love that was hard for me to keep track of. This book had so much potential but it didn’t live up to the expectations I had based on the synopsis. I will give this book props for the setting, it felt wholly real and perfect. The 2 POVs and Past and Present tellings were very confusing at times, but I liked how they did show their different perspectives. The love in this book was utterly perplexing. All in all, this book had an interesting premise but the actual story just didn’t grab me.

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