Happy Birthday, Dead Liz

Between

Written by: Jessica Warman

Released: August 2, 2011 by Walker & Company

Summary: Elizabeth Valchar --- pretty, popular and rich --- wakes up the morning after her 18th birthday on the yacht where she’d been celebrating with her closest friends. A persistent thumping noise has roused her. When she goes to investigate, she finds her own drowned body is hitting the side of the boat. Liz is dead. She has no memory of what happened to her, and can only observe in horror the fallout of her death.

She’s also soon joined by Alex Berg, a quiet boy from her high school who was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The two keep each other company, floating in and out of memories and trying to piece together the details of what happened to each of them.

In her regular life, Liz was a runner. It wasn’t abnormal for her to run 8-10 miles per day. But as memories from closer to her death begin to surface, Liz finds that she’d been running much more than normal, and that she’d all but stopped eating. Liz’s mother, who died when Liz was nine, had battled with anorexia as well, and those around her worried that Liz was following in her mother’s footsteps. But something more sinister was consuming Liz from the inside out...

I think that I will definitely finish reading this one at a later date, but for right now I just have more that I want to read.

The premise of this novel is fantastic. It’s a murder mystery that the victim is essentially solving as she comes to terms with her own death. I know that in time I’ll finish reading this novel and find out exactly what happened the night of Liz’s birthday.

Side note; LOVE the cover. And I received my copy at BEA.

Sadly, this was a DNF for me. It’s not that I wasn’t intrigued or that I didn’t want to know exactly what was going on, but after trying to read it for two months I decided that enough was enough. I read too many books while “reading” this one.