- 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.