The Girl In Between
The Girl In Between series, Book 1
Laekan Zea Kemp
Amazon Digital Services
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Romance
Themes: Cross-Genre, Dreams, Medical Mishaps
****
Description
Afflicted with Kleine-Levin syndrome, teenager Bryn sometimes feels like a stranger in her own life. Uncontrolled episodes of prolonged sleep steal days, even weeks from her life, interrupting school and severing friendships and even leading to her parents' breakup. While many sufferers outgrow their symptoms, her case has defied the norm from the start. Other KLS patients simply fall into darkness, while she has always visited the "dream state," a surreal and ever-shifting place stitched together from memories. She's always been alone here - which is why it's so startling when the boy arrives. He's a stranger, not a memory, and he seems to persist in her dream state even when she wakes back up to reality. His arrival coincides with a disturbing shift in her condition, the appearance of a predatory shadow that follows her into the waking world. Is the boy another delusion, a sign that her condition is deteriorating, or something else - perhaps a sign that her dream state and the shadows are much, much more than a simple quirk of her own mind?
Review
I came close to shaving a half-star off the rating for the abrupt ending, clearly leading into the second book in what appears to be a four part series, but the rest of the story was solid enough I decided to give it a pass. Bryn is a damaged teen from a damaged home, surrounded by other wounded people all struggling to make the best of imperfect lives, coping with burdens and demons they never asked for, yet often find more comforting than the unknown possibilities of letting their unhealthy habits go. It borders on angsty, but manages to stay just this side of the line. It's not a spoiler to say that Bryn's stranger is more than a simple hallucination (this is a fantasy title, after all), though he's no white knight, being at least as flawed and broken as she is. The ending, as I mentioned, feels rather abrupt, and I'm on the fence about continuing (I do have a sizeable backlog already), but overall I found it an enjoyable, sometimes harrowing and gut-wrenching read.