.png)
by Bethany Neal
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: June 10th 2014
What if your last kiss was with the wrong boy?
Cassidy Haines remembers her first kiss vividly. It was on the old covered bridge the summer before her freshman year with her boyfriend of three years, Ethan Keys. But her last kiss--the one she shared with someone at her seventeenth birthday party the night she died--is a blur. Cassidy is trapped in the living world, not only mourning the loss of her human body, but left with the grim suspicion that her untimely death wasn't a suicide as everyone assumes. She can't remember anything from the weeks leading up to her birthday and she's worried that she may have betrayed her boyfriend.
If Cassidy is to uncover the truth about that fateful night and make amends with the only boy she'll ever love, she must face her past and all the decisions she made--good and bad--that led to her last kiss.
Bethany Neal's suspenseful debut novel is about the power of first love and the haunting lies that threaten to tear it apart.
Chapter 1
It’s snowing or maybe it’s raining. . . no, it’s snowing. I can feel the wet flakes gathering in the corners of my eyes, melting down my cheeks like tears. The warmth from the sun I felt on my face only an instant before is gone. When I blink, the only things I see are blotchy white bits of trees and clouds and lights. Where are those lights coming from? I stumble onto my feet and my legs feel Jell-O-y, like I’ve been swimming for a really long time and now the ground feels too rigid.
I take one step and suddenly my whole body stings. I fall to my knees and clutch my middle. The worst pain I’ve ever felt invades my limbs, like when your foot falls asleep except it’s my entire body and it’s epically stronger. I’m screaming and gripping my sides, writhing in the fluffy white snow. And then the pain stops; as fast as it came, it stops. Filled with relief, I do a quick once-over of my body. I even pinch my arm to check if I’m dreaming. How dumb is that?
I manage to open my eyes enough to see a silhouette standing above the waterline among the trees in Dover Park. He—at least I think it’s a he—is staring at me, but not at me, me. He’s staring at the bloody, twisted mess of me on the rocks along the riverbank.
Why are there two of me?! And how did I get in the river?
I run toward my other, mangled body. I must be having a nightmare—but it’s like there’s a force field around me. I sort of melt into the air, then get flung back. I land on my butt in a massive snowbank at the water’s edge, waiting to feel the cold from sitting in waist-deep snow.
A jagged chunk of ice floats by, sparkling in the early-morning moonlight.
I still haven’t felt the cold.
The silhouette is talking now. I hear him, but the words are muffled as if he’s talking underwater. I press my hands to the sides of my face and squeeze my eyes shut, concentrating. His voice comes clearer. . . He’s telling me he didn’t mean to.
Mean to what?
Now he’s telling me this isn’t how it was supposed to go. This is her fault.
Is “her” me?
I open my eyes to check if he’s talking to me, me. He’s not. I look at my Other body, broken and folded in ways a body should never bend over a mound of gray rocks. In one of my Other hands I’m holding something, maybe a piece of paper, but I can’t see it clearly. Snow piles high again around my eyes and my cheeks and now on my shoulders. It comes down, harder and harder, until I feel buried in it. I can’t even see it and I’m buried in it so deep that I can’t breathe.
Slowly a thought creeps in, settles in the front of my mind. It tugs at something I feel like I know but can’t quite remember. I open my mouth to speak it, but I don’t see my breath the way I should in early March. I glance up at the silhouette. He’s crying or maybe he’s yelling; either way, I can see his breath.
I’m not breathing. I don’t need to. The words float past my lips like a rehearsed chorus: “I’m dead.”
My Last Kiss was pretty addicting, especially in the beginning. We have Cassidy who is a ghost and we start off the book with her looking at her dead body. She knows that something must have happened to her but she is missing big chunks of memory from the last 3 weeks before her death. She realizes that she must be a ghost for unfinished business reason but not exactly sure what that is.
The book revolves around the mystery of Cassidy’s plunge off the bridge behind her best friends house. The thing I liked about it was the complexity. It was a gradual progression. It seemed like everything was so simple but then things kept getting more and more complicated as Cassidy pieced together the clues. Although I figured out parts before the end of the book, I loved how the subtle hints were laid throughout. Things that Cassidy didn’t catch on to in life, but seemed to understand more in death. Towards the end I did feel like things were coming at me fast and it was hard to keep straight who was where and when. I wouldn’t have minded some of that being peppered in a bit more earlier. I can also see how the fear might be to give too much away too early. It’s hard when you write a mystery. The writing kept me interested in finding out what was going to happen next. I needed to know how all of the pieces of Cassidy’s story fit together.
Cassidy herself is actually complex. I liked Cassidy in ghost form but the things she did leading up to her death made me really dislike her. It’s one of those things where hindsight is 20/20. It seemed to me that Cassidy in ghost form was more true to herself than she was in her memories. She could see how she had become a different person and was ashamed with herself.
The romance is definitely different in this story because there really can not be a happy ending. My Last Kiss is not about finding love, it’s more about forgiveness than anything else. I really liked this different look at it. I loved looking back on some of Cassidy’s interactions with the boys even though I was pissed at some of the things she did.
There is a great friendship between Cassidy and Aimee in the book. It’s probably one of my favorite girl friendships that I have read. I expected for some reason for Madison and Aimee to be all mean girl about Cassidy but I was pleasantly surprised. Aimee is a hard core true friend to Cassidy even after her death. Even when some things come to light about situations Cassidy had gotten herself involved in. Amee never wavered.
I really enjoyed My Last Kiss because of the slowly progress complex mystery that is involved in it. The book also has one of my favorite friendships between two girls and the romance has a different approach that I really liked.
You can find her locked in her Writertorium for insane amounts of time. But, hey, insanity is fun! My Last Kiss is her first novel.
