Betwixt Blog Tour

Thanks to AToMR Tours, we're spotlighting a brand new YA paranormal book, Betwixt, by Melissa Pearl.  Keep scrolling to check out our review and then enter to win a copy for yourself!

Betwixt

By Melissa Pearl

Published on November 5, 2012
Source: ARC from author for Blog Tour

Beautiful, wild-child Nicole Tepper is hit by a car and left for dead. But when she wakes the next morning, Nicole finds herself in bed without a scratch. Perhaps she was more intoxicated than usual, as her mother is giving her the silent treatment and her friends are ignoring her as well.

Things take a turn for the weird when Nicole soon discovers she is actually hovering between life and death. Her body is lying in the forest while her spirit is searching for anyone who can hear her. Unfortunately the only person who can is Dale Finnigan, the guy she publicly humiliated with a sharp-tongued insult that has left him branded.

Desperate, Nicole has no choice but to haunt Dale and convince the freaked-out senior to help her. Will he find her body before it's too late? Or will the guy who tried to kill her with his car, beat him there and finish her off before anyone finds out?

You can buy the book at any of these fine outlets: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Smashwords

Betwixt is another book where the main characters all have secrets which are affecting the way they interact with everyone, and those secrets slowly trickle out over the course of the story.  Nicole and Dale are two very different people -- Nicole runs with the popular crowd, while Dale only has a few friends.  After Nicole is badly injured in a hit-and-run accident, her spirit remains in limbo between life and death, and for some reason, Dale is the only person who can hear her, and the only person who can help her.

I liked watching Nicole grow as a person over the course of the book.  Since no one can see her, and only Dale can hear her, she gets to learn the truth about a lot of the people who she thought were her friends, who aren't very concerned about the fact that she's suddenly gone missing.  Only Dale, who she rudely dismissed to save face with her friends, is willing to do anything to find her.  Nicole already knew her friends were no good, but seeing their reactions (or lack thereof) really helps her understand the kind of people she's been with.  I saw another reviewer point out that the main theme of this book is second chances, which I think is absolutely true.  Nicole (and her family) and Dale both are people who come to understand (or who already have experienced) the power of a second chance, and there are some pretty uplifting messages in this story once you strip away all of the defenses that Nicole was putting up to hide her secrets from everyone else.

Nicole's a hard character to like at first, because you assume she's as mean as the rest of her friends, but as she slowly begins to realize that her life needs to change to be something more positive, she becomes easier to like.  I thought Dale was a great character, too, the kind of guy that most people ignore or tease because he looks different (his face is badly scarred from an accident), but who despite it all is still a really sweet guy. Reading about his backstory really made me feel for him.  He also easily could have been a caricature or someone played for a joke, but he came off as very real.

This is a book which I honestly wasn't sure how it was going to end.  It could have gone one of two ways, and I kept trying to predict what was happening next.  It definitely kept me turning pages!

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