Between by Jessica Warman
My rating: 3/5 cats
so, when i am cleaning house, i like to have some sort of police procedural on in the background. i don’t know why, i just find them soothing – the shape of the narrative tends to be consistent, and they usually have enough action sequences for me to pace my laundry-folding and book restacking in a productive way.
there is a definite preference-hierarchy to the shows i will watch. law and order (excluding criminal intent) is the preferred choice. ncis and criminal minds are lower, and as i have only recently discovered them, ‘cuz my dad likes them, there are a ton i haven’t seen, which is nice. they are nowhere near as good as law and order, but they will do – sometimes they have good guest actors and some original plotlines. criminal intent comes somewhere down after them – i hate the music for the show, and i hate how every episode ends the same way. in desperate times, i will watch without a trace or csi, but i kind of hate them. but – the house has to get cleaned, right? and it’s all background noise anyway.
but the point is, and there is a point – i can remember the plots of most of the law and orders i have seen. the other shows just kind of form this hazy memory of “something i experienced once to pass the time.” and that’s how i feel about this book, i guess. i mean – looking at the ratings on here, people are over the moon about it. and it has good things going for it, but at the end of the day, it was a diversion, and nothing more, a YA mystery novel with more ambition than some, but not a favorite.
it is similar in a lot of ways to before i fall – dead girl only realizes after she is dead what a horrible bitch she was when she was alive. but instead of getting to go back and try to change certain things, ghost-liz and the ghost of a boy from her school who also recently died can only observe what happens after her death, and slip back and view random episodes from their pasts to try to figure out the mysteries of their deaths.
as a mystery novel, it is enjoyable. even though it is predictable, the pacing is fast, and it is a true page-turner. i read this in two giant gulps, and it was never boring, even when it was clear what the big reveal was going to be. there is something satisfying about it, like chugging orange juice on a really hot day
but the characters. i couldn’t stand any of them. to be fair – they were well-drawn, and every character flaw was shown to have its origin in some presumably forgivable backstory explanation: “i am this way because this person made me this way, and she was like that because she was going through this and that, and the person who was upsetting her was only doing it because blah, etc etc etc.” so, kudos for exhaustive psychological padding.
but at the end of the day, ugh. i may need to use the spoiler button. and this is a real spoiler, not like some people who use them (successfully) to be cute. this is going to be a spoiler-filled rant.
View Spoiler »yeesh.
so, yeah, all that.
i think she is a good writer, and i am going to read more of her books, but this one, while superfun to read while reading it, has already passed from my memory, despite all that rarrrring i just did.
