Paige Harbison

Natalie and Brooke are best friends. They may not have the same outlook on life or have very much in common, but they've got each other's backs. Then Natalie wakes up at a party in bed next to Aiden.... Brooke's boyfriend.

Natalie doesn't know what happened... only that something did. Will Aiden and Natalie face the truth of that night, or will things continue as they've always been? And can a friendship survive a possible betrayal?

My Thoughts:
This is usually the type of book I would like, but *sigh* I just couldn't. It's about Natalie and Brooke, best friends who are complete opposites. But you see Natalie has to be the goody-goody perfect one and Brooke has to be the stereotypical mean girl. And it was just too much. So Natalie gets drunk one night and wakes up next to Brooke's perfect boyfriend, Aiden. The last thing Natalie remembers is making out with Eric... so she chooses to assume that she's slept with Eric and then crawled in bed with Aiden during her blackout state. No, no one will talk about what happened or ask any questions... we will just all assume.

The thing about Natalie is she just won't shut up in her own head. She has to tell you every little observation and every hesitation. I liked her at times, but then she would ruin it by over-sharing. Then there was Aiden who so obviously loved her and she's just too dumb to notice. I really can't stand to read books where characters are completely oblivious to people's super obvious feelings. UGHH it's fustrating.

Then after all that, there's a twist. Which anyone with a brain would see coming a mile away. There were hints dropped and they were HUGE. Honestly it would have just been better for the author to tell the secret right off the bat rather than thinking she was clever dropping the biggest clues she could possibly drop.

After that I was just insanely bored. Everything plays out how a million other books play out. No surprises, no nothing. I don't want to be mean, but this book did nothing for me. And I wanted it to.

OVERALL: Pass on this one. It's not particularly well written and there's a ton of telling, telling, telling. There is a big twist, but Captain Obvious comes along and pretty much spells it out what it's going to be well before it's revealed. I was bored and annoyed through much of the book and wouldn't recommend it.

My Blog:

… (mais)

In the course of a day or several days, it is hard to tell, Bridget treats everyone in her path horribly, from her stepmother Meredith to her best friends Michelle and Jillian to one of her teachers Mr. Ehzno. She is sarcastic and mean when Meredith asks her if she wants to have a girls’ night and go see that movie she had been dying to see. She dismisses Michelle’s vague cry for help when Michelle tells her that she is insecure about her looks. Bridget gets Mr. Ehzno in trouble by starting a rumor that he is having an affair with Meredith. She feels a little guilty after each episode of meanness but not enough to change her behavior; she justifies it by blaming her mostly absent and neglectful father and the tragic death of her mother. She fancies herself as Cinderella and the novel uses this trope throughout the book. In the prologue, Bridget is driving her car and speeding up as she thinks about how sorry everyone would be if she had an accident and died. She imagines her ex-boyfriend, Liam, swearing he’ll never love again, her father leaving her stepmother, and her friends trying to decide what to wear to her funeral. Too late she realizes she can’t control the car and hits a tree. But she doesn’t die; instead she winds up in a boardroom with Anna Judge, the new girl at school that everyone likes, and all of the people she’s been awful to, but they don’t seem to see her. After Bridget is forced to step into the shoes of each of the people she’s hurt, the reader is then subjected to reread all of the scenes of her awfulness from the first part of the book. This part gets repetitive except for some minor insights into the other person’s life that astute readers will have discerned already in the first part of the book. The ending is too predictable and tidy, but some readers may like this book.… (mais)

Because this YA novel is a retelling of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, I just had to read it! I very much enjoyed all of the Rebecca elements that Paige Harbison re-tooled.

I was surprised that the fact that it was a retelling was not mentioned anywhere on the book jacket or front matter, and I wondered why the publishers made that decision.

Trigger alert for rape. If you'd like to avoid this, you can simply skip all of Chapter Twenty, as the subject is never mentioned again. It's just for "character development" a la Tomb Raider.… (mais)