Key Selling Points

• A young girl discovers what life really means after finding out she has an incurable disease.
• Gives insight into living with illness, disability, and confronting one’s mortality at a young age.
• Life Expectancy fits into a growing canon of books about disabled and neurodiverse characters, few of which currently deal with Juvenile Huntington’s Disease (which the main character has), and what confronting a reduced life expectancy might look like for a young person.
• Author has published nineteen books for young adults and children, and was once nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Young People’s Literature for a previous YA novel.
• When the author was in law school, she studied “wrongful birth” tort cases which stayed with her and made her wonder how those children would feel reading their case, as Sophie does in the book.

After her Opportunity Class stages a play about her grandmother’s famous novel, Abomination, Sophie St. John’s suspicions that her family is keeping something from her are confirmed. While doing her Legal Studies homework she discovers a case, a lawsuit launched by her parents when she was born that reveals that Sophie has a serious disease, a reduced life expectancy and that she might be very rich.Faced with the reality that she may not have much time left, Sophie ponders what it means to really live and bravely decides to face the future on her own terms.

While Life Expectancy explores disability and dying, it is ultimately a story about love, meaning, and finding the courage to live fully in the face of uncertainty.