Book Review- Between Here & Forever

By Elizabeth Scott

Published by Simon Pulse

Released on May 24th, 2011

Source- ARC from publisher for review

3 stars- It's a good read

Abby accepted that she can’t measure up to her beautiful, magnetic sister Tess a long time ago, and knows exactly what she is: Second best. Invisible.

Until the accident.

Now Tess is in a coma, and Abby’s life is on hold. It may have been hard living with Tess, but it's nothing compared to living without her.

She's got a plan to bring Tess back though, involving the gorgeous and mysterious Eli, but then Abby learns something about Tess, something that was always there, but that she’d never seen.

Abby is about to find out that truth isn't always what you think it is, and that life holds more than she ever thought it could... (quoted from Goodreads).

I am one of those readers who has a love, dislike relationship with contemporaries. I either enjoy them or despise them and I don't know why there's no middle ground with my feelings for them. There's only a few writers who's contemporaries I will pick up without any hesitation and Elizabeth Scott is one of them. Her writing in Between Here and Forever not only flowed well and had my attention from page one, but the emotional aspect of the book between Abby, her family and Eli really brought the story to life.

Abby is a character I had a hard time with. She has this incredibly low self esteem that became annoying at times, because she constantly compares herself to her older sister Tess and she excepts others to see do the same. Abby puts her self down so much that she refuses to believe that other people see her for who she is, and not what Abby wants them to see. That's what bothered me the most with her character, because she ends up pushing some pretty amazing people away from her because of that. At the same time, this is what makes her relatable. I think there will be readers who will relate to her feelings of inadequacy, which often times happens during those really fun teen years.

At first I felt bad for Abby and I wanted to reach out to her and help her feel better, and help her realize she's nothing like her sister. I wanted to her realize there's more to her than she sees. After her college age, beautiful and "perfect" sister comes home and ends up in a coma after a tragic accident, I felt Abby just became selfish. She felt trapped and able to move on with her life now that Tess is in her coma, and in order for her to move on, she wants Tessa to wake up. This is when Elizabeth Scott's writing shines. Everything up this point is through Abby's eyes, and how she perceived everything. As the story starts to turn Elizabeth allowed me to realize that Abby's feelings are only a small part in the story, there's a lot more to Tess than even Abby realized. In learning about "the real" Tess, Abby learns a lot more about herself.

I really loved Eli, the love interest in the story. I liked the role he plays in Abby realizing that everyone has insecurities, life is unpredictable, and everyone has something that holds them back. She has Tess and Eli has his OCD, which I thought Elizabeth wrote in a fantastic way. Elizabeth Scott has a talent for weaving together realistic topics, and pulling back the emotional layers through out her story little by little leaving both her characters and readers feeling vulnerable. Between Here and Forever doesn't have a warm fuzzy ending, but a relatable, true to life hopeful one. This is a story about Abby's journey into letting go and believing in herself. Believing she can be loved, believing she is beautiful and she deserves to live her life free of being in Tess's shadow. It's also a story about love, over coming insecurities, deception, forgiveness and moving on. There is some extremely mild language and very mild sexual context, and over all this is a book I'd recommend to readers 14 yrs and older.