Author: Nicole McInnes
Series: N/A
Pages: 400
Published: expected August 23 2016
Source: ARC from publisher
Rating: 2.5/5
Agnes doesn't know it, but she only has one hundred days left to live. When she was just a baby, she was diagnosed with Progeria, a rare disease that causes her body to age at roughly ten times the normal rate. Now nearly sixteen years old, Agnes has already exceeded her life expectancy.
Moira has been Agnes’s best friend and protector since they were in elementary school. Due to her disorder, Agnes is still physically small, but Moira is big. Too big for her own liking. So big that people call her names. With her goth makeup and all-black clothes, Moira acts like she doesn’t care. But she does.
Boone was friends with both girls in the past, but that was a long time ago—before he did the thing that turned Agnes and Moira against him, before his dad died, before his mom got too sad to leave the house.
An unexpected event brings Agnes and Moira back together with Boone, but when romantic feelings start to develop, the trio’s friendship is put to the test.
For me as a reader, contemporary YA novels succeed or fail based on the characters within them. If they are vibrant, memorable, flawed, and most of all, realistic renderings of people, I can forgive a lot of imperfections. For the most part, the characters in 100 Days have the potential to be these things, rather than actually showcasing them in the pages. There's a lot of potential across the board for McInnes second novel, but I found the end result to be somewhat shallow, lacking in emotional depth, and also easily predicted.
With a premise that seems to be ever popular for the YA age group, there wasn't a lot about 100 Days to set it apart from its contemporaries. A lot of YA, following the wake of John Green's success with The Fault in Our Stars, focuses on dying teens and the pivotal relationships they form before dying. 100 Days is unique in that it features a character with progeria, but it also doesn't only focus on Agnes' illness. A lot of the story is spent developing the history of Agnes, Moira, and Boone.. but it's sadly less than compelling.
The book does move along quite quickly with its rotating 3-person POVs, despite the hefty 400-page length. It was just too long, too underdeveloped, and too generic to make much of an impact.
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