Jen's review of "Between" by Jessica Warman

BETWEEN by Jessica Warman

Publication date: October 1st, 2011

Publisher: Hardie Grant Books

Number of pages: 436

Format: Paperback

Buy: Amazon | The Book Depository

Description: Elizabeth Valchar --- pretty, popular and rich --- wakes up the morning after her 18th 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 that Liz was following in her mother’s footsteps. But something more sinister was consuming Liz from the inside out..

I admit, this is probably usually not the sort of book that I would pick up, but I found the blurb quite fascinating and I just knew I had to read it.
I was glad too, because It was such a riviting and compelling story and one that was also unique in its own right.

The first chapter got me glued in on the story, as we get taken to the night in question. Elizabeth wakes up in the middle of the night after celebrating the night before her 18th birthday with her friends on her father's boat.
Things don't go as planned, because when she wakes up she discovers something rocking against the boat.. a body.

HERS.

Intriguing, right? Yes, I thought so.  From that point onwards it was only a waiting game until someone discovers her body and so she can remember what just happened, and who killed her. Or was it an accident?

Not too soon after she discovers her own body does she find herself not alone. A boy stands next to her and he can see her. She can see him, which only means one thing: He is also dead.

She soon realizes that they know each other, and they figure they can see each other because they are meant to help one another move forward. They seem to be stuck in the 'between' not alive, not dead. But in between planes.
Together they go on a journey to discover what really happened to her, and Liz soon finds out that she wasn't the sort of person she thought she was.
New discoveries of her own life and the ones of her friends soon come to light, and by the end she will question whether she knew who she really was to begin with.

Its interesting how much a person can change after death. I didn't really like the person she was before she died, from the parts we saw, but I did like the person she was after all this happened. I like that we got inside her life, and found out things about why she was the person that she was as there was a reason for it.

Rating: 4/5