Between

A few nights ago I started reading Between by Jessica Warman, realizing that it had been sitting on my bookshelf unread since my post-birthday book run.

I was a little skeptical at first, having only picked out the book because it had an appealing cover, not having bothered to read the description, however so far I'm enjoying it and I'm almost done. The premise of Between is that Elizabeth Valchar, who has the most seemingly perfect lifestyle, wakes up in the middle of the night to hear a thumping on the side of the boat she's in. Her friends seem to not notice the noise, and she walks outside onto the deck by herself to find her own dead body floating in the ocean. Liz soon finds out that she is dead and the only other person who can see her is a former highschool peer of hers who died a year back, Alex. She also realizes that she has almost no memories of her entire life or how she came to die. Through the course of the book Liz and Alex try to discover Liz's past, both in what kind of a person she was as well as the cause of her drowning.

What I've really liked about this book so far is the uniqueness of the plot and character development. Warman makes Liz out to have been a horrible person when she was living, the kind of protaginist I would never have wanted to read about. However in death as Liz experiences her memories for a second time as well as sees how her friends and family are coping she begins to realize what she's done wrong and why she turned out to be the vain, shallow person she had become. She uses Alex as a means to apologize for her wrongs, as he was one of the people she had bullied. Speaking on the topic of Alex, the one thing I would like to see more of as I read the last 100 pages of this book is more focus on Alex's character. I know that the book is about Liz, however supposedly Alex had been hanging around by himself for a year until Liz came. I want to know how that changed him, as well as how Alex is going about retrieving his own memories. Of the few scenes we've had so far where Liz has been allowed to see from Alex's perspective, I've really enjoyed them and I would like to get a little more back story for him.

I'm really excited to continue reading this book!