A review by liralen
Full Disclosure, by Camryn Garrett
4.0
I have a vague memory of a man who came to speak to my class when I was in middle(?) school. He was HIV positive, and he told some of his story and patiently answered some questions born of various degrees of ignorance. I don't remember if he told us how he'd contracted HIV, or how long he'd had it; I do remember him saying that he'd attempted suicide multiple times, once relatively recently. I think I remember somebody asking (again, with ignorance but not disrespect, for which I am in retrospect grateful) about whether we could catch it from him.
That was close to twenty years ago. Much has changed, and much hasn't. In Full Disclosure, Simone has had HIV since birth, but it's something that with medication she can manage: there's no reason to think that she won't have a long, healthy life, and as long as her viral count is undetectable (again, thanks to medication), the virus also isn't spreadable. Her parents have lost friends to AIDS, but Simone is unlikely to see anything like their loss, or like the losses that speaker had seen.
But Simone also knows that she has to keep her diagnosis a secret, because while she poses no risk to anybody around her, ignorance puts her at risk. That much hasn't changed. And when somebody blackmails her, threatening to expose her status, she knows what could happen: being ostracised, losing friends, being driven out of school. It's happened before.
On the whole this is doing it right: it's a complex look at a complex subject, with lots of through-lines and subplots. Simone is in what I'll call a societally forgivable position of having contracted HIV independent of any choice she could possibly have made, but she more than once makes the point that that doesn't matter; even if her choices had led to her diagnosis, that wouldn't have a bearing on her worth as a person or her right to compassion/privacy/etc. To that end, while there are other characters in the book who are positive, we don't learn the context for their HIV. Why? Because it shouldn't matter.
In places I would have liked more, though. There's some drama with Simone's half brother, but it's eclipsed by the blackmailing and isn't really picked up again. There's some conflict about race, including between Simone and the boy she likes (they're both black, but they have different views of how much they're willing to take from white classmates), but it isn't fully resolved.
But gosh. It's cool to see this, especially considering how young the author is—if she's doing this kind of thing already, she's going to be a literary force to be reckoned with in a few years.
That was close to twenty years ago. Much has changed, and much hasn't. In Full Disclosure, Simone has had HIV since birth, but it's something that with medication she can manage: there's no reason to think that she won't have a long, healthy life, and as long as her viral count is undetectable (again, thanks to medication), the virus also isn't spreadable. Her parents have lost friends to AIDS, but Simone is unlikely to see anything like their loss, or like the losses that speaker had seen.
But Simone also knows that she has to keep her diagnosis a secret, because while she poses no risk to anybody around her, ignorance puts her at risk. That much hasn't changed. And when somebody blackmails her, threatening to expose her status, she knows what could happen: being ostracised, losing friends, being driven out of school. It's happened before.
On the whole this is doing it right: it's a complex look at a complex subject, with lots of through-lines and subplots. Simone is in what I'll call a societally forgivable position of having contracted HIV independent of any choice she could possibly have made, but she more than once makes the point that that doesn't matter; even if her choices had led to her diagnosis, that wouldn't have a bearing on her worth as a person or her right to compassion/privacy/etc. To that end, while there are other characters in the book who are positive, we don't learn the context for their HIV. Why? Because it shouldn't matter.
In places I would have liked more, though. There's some drama with Simone's half brother, but it's eclipsed by the blackmailing and isn't really picked up again. There's some conflict about race, including between Simone and the boy she likes (they're both black, but they have different views of how much they're willing to take from white classmates), but it isn't fully resolved.
Spoiler
I'm also sort of surprised by how few questions Miles has before being very comfortable with the knowledge of Simone's status, especially considering how not cool his parents end up being with it. Obviously I wanted him as a character to get there, and get there fast, but I wondered whether more questions wouldn't have been more realistic. As a reasonably informed adult, I would have questions—I learned things from this book, and there was a lot of info that Simone passed on to the reader but that Miles didn't necessarily have.But gosh. It's cool to see this, especially considering how young the author is—if she's doing this kind of thing already, she's going to be a literary force to be reckoned with in a few years.