Tuesday 28 February 2012

The Return of Trash Tuesday: The Trash-ening

I said I would review Between on the blog in February. Thanks only to the fact that 2012 is a leap year, I'm going to manage it.


It's been awhile since I did a review, so refresh your concept of BROWNIAN MOTION, my patented* rating system. 


I'm making a change this time: instead of a day by day aftermath rating I'm going to to let you know how I felt while I was actually reading the book because my opinion has not changed since I finished it.


Ready? O-K.




Between, Jessica Warman


I picked Between up because I was looking for something without angels, vampires, werewolves, love triangles, magic (or Magick), faeries, aliens, creatures from another dimension or dystopian government oppression. I wanted the 'real world'.


The back of Between sounded promising:


Elizabeth Vachar is young. beautiful and popular. Everything is right in her expensive, glossy life...until the night of her eighteenth birthday party, on her parent's yacht. A persistent thumping noise from outside the boat wakes her. What Liz finds changes everything she thought she knew about her life, her friends, and what lies in between.


I'm not giving anything away when I say that the body is Liz and that the book is narrated by her ghost. I grew up reading Christopher Pike and by page six was already comparing it to Remember Me. Not favourably either. Only a few pages in I was ready to put the book on the bottom of the TBR pile for the next printed-word drought. Except that there was no TBR pile anymore and it was this or nothing. 


Boy am I glad I kept reading.


Liz is dead at the end of Chapter 1 and everyone accepts that it was a tragic accident before we hit page sixty. There is no drama about the situation for the living, beyond her death and funeral for most of the book. Liz mostly watches her friends and family cope with her absence and try to move on. But what they do, or don't do, reveals a lot - both about Liz and about how she died.



There are definite echoes of Remember Me in Between. It's narrated by a ghost, exactly how she died is a mystery, and there are lots and lots of family secrets, but the similarities are mostly surface detail and I think I'd have found them in almost any book with a ghost as the major character. The most impressive things about this book were the subtle changes that Warman made to Liz after each visit to her past. The only way I can think of to accurately describe the transformation is that I got to watch a character grow up, and do so pretty believably, in only 430 pages. 


The mystery is written well. I kept revising my opinion of The Truth because Warman kept feeding me crumbs which, together, seemed to make a cake. Every time I thought I had it worked out, another bit would come out and I would have to revise my opinion. The actual Cake-of-Truth at the end was made of most of the crumbs and it wasn't a surprise, but I like it when authors make you second-guess yourself, even if it's just a little bit.

The book may have paranormal DNA, and I may be So. Over.That.  but Warman's writing is engaging and the visits to the past are written in such a way that you forget the fact that the narrator is already dead. By the end, I wanted Liz to somehow make it. To be able to go back to her body and take the things she had learned with her. Mostly I just wanted to hug her. And I hated her in the first few chapters. Hated. 



Between is about death and learning about yourself. but it isn't preachy. The author doesn't bash you over the head with life lessons, make the book into some kind of Very Special Episode or have everyone hug at the end and promise to be nicer to the school outcast. Not everyone is able to move on.


Since there are two mysteries in the book, telling you much more would be spoiling. Suffice it to say that I really enjoyed it, despite an initial wobble and that I'll be adding it to my 'Read Again' pile.


Brownian Rating:


Bookstore reaction: Awesome. YA crime. That thumping noise outside has got to be a body and Liz is going to turn Nancy Drew. I love Nancy Drew! 9/10


Chapter 1: Aw CRAP. This is going to be a rehash of Christopher Pike's Remember Me isn't it? Those are some pretty big shoes to fill Warman. I'm not sure you're going to live up to my memory of that book** 4/10


Chapter 2: Aaaaaaaand we've got the dead classmate guide going on. He was hit by a car a year ago. Yeah. This is totally Remember Me, except Liz is kind of a shallow bitch and I think I hate her. 2/10


Chapter  6: Okay. Maybe it's not a total rip-off. Liz is messed up. Is that pity, or do I need another cookie? 3/10


Chapter 12: Seriously messed up! Man. That feeling was pity. I actually feel sorry for you Liz. Sorry for calling you a shallow bitch. 6/10


Chapter 21: Oh god. You poor screwed up girl. I saw it coming, but I didn't see THAT coming. Wow. Okay. Not Remember Me. I hope when I die that this does not happen to me and I solemnly swear to be nicer to people so viewing the past isn't so horrible if it does. 8/10


Finish: I think I might have actually cried a bit. 8/10


For a book that started out high and which would have been abandoned before Chapter 2 if I'd had anything else to read, Between ended on a high note. I think it is one of the better YA books I've read this year and I'll keep an eye out for  more of Warman's work.


If you do pick it up and start to draw comparisons with Christopher Pike, favourable or not, don't give into the temptation to lump them together. Like Liz Vachar, there is definitely more going on under the surface here and it is worth finding out.


*Patent pending


** Unrepentant C.Pike FIEND here. Remember Me is third on my list of favourites after Sati and Witch. The sequels didn't happen. La la la. I can't hear you.

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