"If you believed thoughts were energy, and energy is matter (e=mc-squared) and that matter never disappears, then a person can never truly leave you unless you stop thinking about them - everything you once shared with a person is still there, swirling around there in the universe!"
Meet Campbell Cooper, age 17. For the last seven years, she has been fighting a disease that threatens her very existence. And now, after all the chemotherapy, the trials, and the hospitals, the doctor says she's done. That is, unless, a miracle occurs.
But, of course, Campbell doesn't believe in miracles: how can she? Her father and mother split up and then he died, and her mother didn't even cry at his funeral. And now, through all of her mother's flings, numerous cancer trials that give her yeast infections, shingles, blueberry spots, destroy her immune system and what-not, the doctors tell her she won't live through the summer, to see her eighteenth birthday. Miracles, in her world, simply do not occur - there has to be a logical explanation for everything.
Although she does not believe, Cam moves 1,500 miles away anyway, from everything she knows to a new everything because, although her life sentence is unfair and terrible and just plain sad, there are others (her family) that just need to believe - either through acupuncture, reflexology, a herbalist, hypnotism, Samoan medicine and even a distance healer. Just to believe, to have a little bit of hope even for a little bit of time!
When you think about it, when someone writes/reads a cancer book, the only thing you can focus on, or rather, a reader can think about, is the big C and whether the protagonist lives long enough to find love, or just to live. The Probability of Miracles, on the contrary, is not one of those books.
I won't ruin it for you; it won't be just as fun and amazing and bittersweet as it was for me when I read it!
The Probability of Miracles is about death - how you can, if you want to, make yourself more than the disease that threatens your life; one that will probably take it away too.
It's about family, and home, and crossing the ends of the earth to do anything for that unconditional love that grounds you and will continue to do so forever. It's about love, and how everyone wants it, but not everybody stays long enough to find it and one very special boy!
It's about friendship and how sometimes that one special friend always knows exactly what to say and when to say it - and how you have to fight, till the end of (your) time to hold on to something that is that strong.
It's about a list: A Flamingo List - a list of things to do before you die.
But mostly, and this is what touched me the most - it's not about how long you have to live, but LIVING in that time - no matter how unfair!
It's romantic yet heartbreaking, it will make you laugh and cry and will leave you thinking about it for a long time to come!
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