Five Feet Apart by Rachel Lippencott is one of those coming of age novels, that will leave you smiling, laughing, or shedding a tear or two at one point or another. The story follows the life of Stella Grant, a cystic fibrosis patient who is on the brink of becoming 18. For her whole life, Stella has had to live with a disorder that limits every aspect of her life, and as Stella’s class whisk away to bright coasts of Mexico for their senior trip, Stella is forced to stay at Saint Grace’s, the hospital that has been equivalent to Stella’s home for her entire life. Stella is the epitome of order, and her life, like that of many other CF patients, depends on a mixture of factors, but one of the most important is following a medical regime, filled with meticulous patterns of med dosages and activities. For Stella, following her regime, means keeping her shattered family together and maintaining the little lung function she still. During yet another of Stella’s hospital stay, an unfamiliar CF patient, Will, turns up. Will is in similar shoes to Stella, but Will is not worried about sustaining the meticulous and endless medical regime that comes will CF. Instead, Will is set on pursuing the reckless, in an effort to live the last bit of life he convinces himself that he has left. When Will arrives at Saint Grace’s Hospital, things change for both young CFers, and for once in their lives, they have come to the realization that they will not let cystic fibrosis take away everything they have got.

Five Feet Apart has been adapted into a film that will be released in theaters on March 13.