Living with it

This book immediately captured my imagination when I read that it would focus upon the MMR vaccine and the potential consequences of not vaccinating your children. I have been that parent scared by all the mixed reports on the MMR vaccine and took it so seriously that I arranged separate vaccines for my eldest children and would have done the same for my younger 2 had the UK not stopped providing access to a stand alone mumps vaccine.

This book takes us into the world of Isobel and her husband Eric, who find out whilst on holiday with a group of friends that their eldest child, Gabriella, has measles. Isobel had been worried about the links between the MMR vaccine and autism, driven in part by her experiences of seeing one of her friends deal with the challenges of raising an autistic child, and subsequently her children are all unvaccinated.

The issues begin when Gabriella's contact with Isobel's best friends baby, Iris, leads to her also contracting the disease leading to Iris losing her hearing completely. Suddenly Isobel begins to feel like public enemy number one. Her best friend Ben issues legal proceedings to sue her for the damage caused to Iris' hearing, her own husband seems to blame her for not having vaccinated the children stating that he'd indulged her choice but never agreed with it and all their friends seem to be picking sides.

It was a really interesting plot for a book, I really could empathise with Ben's anger that his ‘perfect' child has been taken away from him and he wants to make someone responsible, even if this meant his character was not always portrayed in the most sympathetic light. I also found the sections where he and his wife Maggie struggled to manage the decision about whether to have cochlear implants for Iris really insightful and it was these parts I found best rather than the constant hand wringing of Isobel trying to come to terms with what had happened as a consequence of her decision, yet she never seemed to take any proactive steps to deal with her choice.

I was never pro MMR but I was always very wary of not vaccinating at all and so I couldn't find sympathy with her choice as she was portrayed as an educated, reasonably affluent woman who had she researched at the time of her children's youth could have vaccinated without risk through single vaccines. The way her character was written she was portrayed as a slightly over bearing and neurotic mother so I found it difficult to think she wouldn't have explored this nor that the author would have taken time to outline why Isobel didn't make this choice.

All in all this book was about acceptance, Ben's acceptance of the daughter he has now versus the perfect child he expected and this was a great part of the book as it seemed by the end we'd reached that point. I had to take stars off though due to the slightly irritating ending which seemed to simply set the book right back to the start. It was infuriating not to follow it through further and leave the reader hanging and defeated for me the strength of the acceptance theme in the book by bringing it back to our shortcomings as humans and parents.

It was an okay read, my first by this author and it's subject matter sounded great but for me it's tendency to remain quite superficial let it down.