Zac and Mia by A.J Betts Review

-Contains Spoilers-
Comparing; The act of noting or recording the similarity or dissimilarity between an object or abstract entity, quality, or concept. I think it is no surprise that I like, maybe even love The Fault in Our Stars and naturally I compare every book I about cancer to TFiOS. I really shouldn’t do that, because every book has its own story and its own message so I really shouldn’t compare them to each other, but to me it’s a natural instinct to compare what is similar to each other. I also seem to forget that John Green isn’t the only author to ever write about cancer. As I probably already let on Zac and Mia is a book with cancer patients as the protagonists and since it’s a cancer book I compared it to the much beloved The Fault in Our Stars. Zac and Mia is a sweet story and more realistic than The Fault in Our Stars, but had scenes that had me skeptic. Please let me stress that this book should not be in comparison to The Fault in Our Stars, Zac and Mia carries its own, unique story about two teens living with cancer.

I felt that character development was almost perfect with Zac and Mia and they were such believable characters. Zac’s attitude is ‘okay, I have cancer. I can’t change that. I’m just going to accept it and go through therapy.’ While Mia is vain at the start of the novel and her attitude speaks volumes about her, ‘I hate cancer. I don’t want to lose my hair! What I have to lose my ankle?! Life is so unfair why this is happening during MY YEAR 12 FORMAL?!!’. I sort of understand where Mia is coming from. I won’t want to lose my hair or have cancer or have my formal spoiled, but I couldn’t help resenting her. Due to her sense of self-worth she doesn’t see how lucky she is. She has the best odds of surviving at of everyone in the ward. She has a mother who means well and her cancer is in her ankle so she could just cut it off. I felt that she was such a brat and drama queen about it.

Zac’s cancer is in his blood stream and bones, he can’t cut a limb off to get rid of his cancer, his cancer is everywhere. (He has leukemia) If by some cruel twist of fate I get cancer I think I would have been a mix of Zac and Mia, but would have acted more like Zac. Zac was mature about it and didn’t try to ignore his cancer and wasn’t vain. Zac was a very likable character and he had an easy going nature. In the end I started warming up to Mia and loved her relationship with her mother. When I finished the book I wasn’t sure if I liked Mia or not, but now that I have had more time to dull on it, I think I like Mia, but not as much as I like Zac and her mother. I think the mothers made the story more meaning. Zac’s mother is the perfect mother who is caring, supportive and overbearing. Mia’s mum mean’s well and does what she can to help and protect her daughter. Throughout the book I felt how much she cared about Mia and how much she loved her. I also was on her side when her daughter hated her for allowing the doctors to cut off her ankle to save her. The mothers off this book just made me like it so much more.

This is my own edit, that I made a while back.

The plot I felt was a little weak. The story started out strong, but went a little downhill. Mia running away felt too dramatic and her running into Zac felt too planned and not natural. The world is small, but not that small. Australia is a big country and I doubt that they would run into each other, but it was an important part of the story for them to run into each other after their treatment, but I wish it was done in a different way. Briefly, the plot seemed a little lacking to me; some background drama would've been preferred to make it more eventful. I forced myself to read through it sometimes, because it wasn’t very interesting at some parts. All in all, with minor flaws in the plot and characters, I found myself still loving the story overall. Compassionate and confronting are two words to describe this novel. While not perfect, Zac and Mia has a strong story filled with wit, humour and heart felt moments.

A.J Betts signature when i saw her at the Writers Festival.

The author of this novel is A.J Betts. Originally after reading the book I felt disappointed, because as mentioned before the plot seemed a bit lacking. On the 27th of August my school went to the Writers Festival week in Melbourne and we saw her talk for about half an hour. She was so humble, funny and down to Earth. I really wanted to talk about the book with her more in depth, but I got shy, but I was able to get a picture with her with my school book club. After hearing her talk I felt like I appreciated the book more. I now knew why she wrote it how it was. I now understood that to me it might have seemed downhill, but in reality it didn’t go downhill it went realistic. It went into a moment when everything was raw. Cancer was romanticised, it was shown in a realistic way, in all its fury and terror.  The character’s weren’t sick when it fit into the plot, they were consistently sick. Authors get to influence what a reader reads, but ultimately the reader gets to decide on how they interpret the story.  In the end, with this book I feel like the author got to decide what I read and how I ended up interpreted the story.

-The girl with her head in the clouds