Review: Between by Jessica Warman

Title: Between

Author: Jessica Warman

Series: Stand Alone

Pages: 320

Published: Available August 2, 2011 by Walker & Co.

ISBN: 9780802721822

Source: Around The World Tours

Description: Elizabeth Valchar--pretty, popular, and rich--wakes up the morning after her eighteenth birthday on the yacht where she'd been celebrating with her closest friends. A persistent thumping noise has roused her. When she goes to investigate, she finds her own drowned body is hitting the side of the boat. Liz is dead. She has no memory of what happened to her, and can only observe in horror the fallout of her death. She's also soon joined by Alex Berg, a quiet boy from her high school who was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The two keep each other company, floating in and out of memories and trying to piece together the details of what happened to each of them. In her regular life, Liz was a runner. It wasn't abnormal for her to run 8-10 miles per day. But as memories from closer to her death begin to surface, Liz finds that she'd been running much more than normal, and that she'd all but stopped eating. Liz's mother, who died when Liz was nine, had battled with anorexia as well, and those around her worried Liz was following in her mother's footsteps. But something more sinister was consuming Liz from the inside out. . 

I Give This ...

 

I adore this cover for some reason.  It's haunting and goes perfectly well with the impression I got from the description.  I had high hopes for this one.

At first, I was afraid it was going to disappointment.  The direction the story was taking reminded me a lot of Some Girls Are and it wasn't giving me the same need to read drive.  Liz was pretty and popular, but it turned out that she also wasn't very nice.  Or more along that lines that she had some friends who were downright mean and she did nothing to stop them.  She was afraid to lose her place among them.  As she sees herself in flashbacks, she begins to see herself in a new light and it isn't very flattering.

I thought Alex was really hard on Liz at first.  Yes, he had every right to dislike her, but I was fond of how he portrayed his feelings.  The more she saw the more she regretted and Alex was really unforgiving.  I felt sorry for him and all he had to endure.  Especially in light of some of the flashbacks we are allowed to see.  Since this is Liz's story, I don't think we get to know him as well as I would have liked.

The living characters were an interesting mix.  I didn't like Josie and her mom at all.  They both seemed really fake and would stop at nothing to get what they wanted.  They had an unnatural ability to put themselves in the right place at the right time.  I liked Ryder (Liz's boyfriend).  What he goes through after Liz's death was emotional.  There rest of the characters round out the story nicely.

I was actually surprised by the twists in the story.  I don't know how I didn't see it coming.  Poor Liz!  I can't imagine what she was going through.  She was twisted and manipulated so much that she dealt with it the only way she knew how.  In the end she was left with no one to talk to or who might understand.  I think that last 100 pages or so were the best part of the story.