Between by Jessica Warman

“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 have been a fan of Jessica Warman’s since I read Breathless a few months back, then I got a copy of Where The Truth Lies and loved it too. When I heard she had a book coming out that was different than the previous two I knew I had to read it.

I won’t recap how the book starts, because the synopsis already explains that pretty well. I also cannot really get into the book much, because there are big twists and turns very often. Instead I’m going to keep this pretty simple, Between hooked me from the first page. Warman’s writing style is AMAZING. If you haven’t read anything by her, check out any of the three books, trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

Between was faintly similar to Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver. The main similarities are pretty obvious-Liz is pretty popular, and wasn’t very nice. And of course, there’s the fact she’s dead. In Between Liz and Alex are both searching for the answer to what happened the night they died. Liz explores her life in a flashback sort of way where she and Alex (sometimes together, sometimes separately) visit past events. With their ability to teleport, we get to see what’s happening in the present as well. I would like to say that while Liz wasn’t really nice the majority of the time, she was still pretty likable. I felt she was much more relatable than I’d expected her to be.

Between was as wonderful as I expected it would be. I definitely encourage everyone to check it out!