Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley
Thoughts at a glance: **** (I really liked it) Aza Ray Boyle has been dying since she was born. It's some sort of lung condition so rare that it's actually named after her, because she is the only person who has it. She has spent the entirety of her life in and out of hospitals, taking medication, being stuck with needles, etc. What makes it bearable is her loving family and her best friend Jason, who is just as smart and weird as she is. In the week before her sixteenth birthday, she starts hallucinating a ship sailing through the storm clouds. She wakes up with a feather in her lungs. She hears distant voices calling for her. "Magonia," Jason tells her. Her hallucination reminds him of things he's read, about a mythical land existing in the skies, sailing here and there, masked by the clouds. And after she finally passes away, five days before her birthday (not a spoiler), Jason is the one who spots the ship in the sky above her funeral. Aza wakes up abo...