Chick Lit Plus Blog Tour: Here

Welcome to another stop on the blog tour for Here: On the Otherside Series by Denise Grover Swank! This is another tour organized by Samantha over at Chick Lit Plus Blog Tours and I'm very happy I got to be a part of this tour. I enjoyed Here even if it didn't take the path I thought it would.

Here's the synopsis, courtesy of Goodreads:

Sixteen year old Julia Phillips buries herself in guilt after killing her best friend Monica in a car accident. Julia awoke in the hospital with a broken leg, a new talent for drawing and false memories of the accident, in which she dies and Monica lives. The doctors attribute this to her head injury, but no one can explain how a bracelet engraved with her name ended up at the scene of the accident. A bracelet no one has ever seen before.

Classmate Evan Whittaker paid Julia no attention before the accident, let alone after. Now suddenly he’s volunteering to tutor her and offering to drive her home. She can't ignore that his new obsession started after his two-day disappearance last week and that he wears a pendant she’s been drawing for months. When the police show up one night looking for Evan, he begs Julia to run with him, convincing her that Monica is still alive. Julia agrees to go, never guessing where he’s really from.

I was loving the book up until the big plot twist (more on that later). Afterwards, I still really liked it. Even though the main characters were all teenagers, and therefore much younger than me, I was hooked on their story. Julia is so tortured with guilt and sadness and doesn't have anyone to turn to. I felt her pain and her delight when popular Evan starts paying attention to her.

As I mentioned earlier, this book had a crazy twist to it that I really wasn't expecting. While I knew something had to be revealed I was not at all ready for where Swank took the plot. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing, don't get me wrong. On Goodreads I only ranked this book as three stars but I think it's more of a three and a half. It would be a four if this twist wasn't so...futuristic...I think that's the way I want to describe it. It's not really the future but it has a crazy fantastical element to it. I really enjoyed the twist but it wasn't exactly a sub-genre that I enjoyed so I couldn't quite give it a full four stars. And no, I am not about to give anything away so that's all you're going to get out of me about that :)

If you like realistic novels but enjoy a good sci-fi book every once and awhile you will probably really enjoy this book. I'm not a sci-fi girl myself (I tend to lean more towards the fantasy side) so I think that's why I didn't find myself loving the book all the way through. By the way, Here is the first book in a series. Will I read the next books? Maybe. I do want to know what happens to Julia and her friends but I'm not sure if this genre is for me. I know others will love it because the story is captivating and Swank tells it well.

Stay tuned for my first ever author interview! My interview with Swank will be posted on Thursday the 22nd. And make sure you check out this link to see what other bloggers think of Here and leave a comment there - you could win a $10 Amazon.com gift card!

Happy reading :)