Dead Rules by Randy Russell

Title: Dead Rules
Author: Randy Russell
Release Date:
Synopsis:

When high school junior Jana Webster dies suddenly, she finds herself in Dead School, where she faces choices that will determine when she, a Riser, will move on, but she strives to become a Slider instead, for the chance to be with the love of her life--even if it means killing him.

Love wasn't all red paper valentines and candy hearts. Sometimes love was despair. and sometimes love was wrong. Jana loved Michael enough to kill him for it. Jana loved Michael to death.

Review:

Dead Rules has sort of a psychological thriller vibe to it. Yeah, not my usual daily read but not any less entertaining.
When the book first started, I was confused. I didn't realize that Jana was in the Dead School, I honestly didn't think that she would be the one to die either. Sometimes I don't read the back off a book because I want to be surprised when something happens. For this books, though, i did read the back and what I discovered was just a cryptic little paragraph thing. "Love wasn't all red paper valentines and candy hearts. Sometimes love was despair. and sometimes love was wrong. Jana loved Michael enough to kill him for it. Jana loved Michael to death." I thought Jana going to go psychotic and murder her boyfriend. Turns out that I was wrong.
Anyway, throughout the book the author introduces a bunch or characters from the Dead School and with each new character, a story of their death follows. in a way all the deaths seem sort of Final Destination with the spontaneous way they happen. One minuet you're riding a motorcycle, the next, half your face is smeared across fifty feet of asphalt... What really sucks for the people of the dead school is that however they look like when they die is how they look for the rest of their afterlife.
Well...onto slightly less morbid topics...
Jana is the main character of the book. Her death the product of a practical joke gone awry, but that's all the detail that I'll give you about her death. (You guys can find out more if you read it and if you have read it, then you know what I'm talking about.) To me, Jana seems slightly disturbed, mentally speaking. Something about her seems off when the author focuses around her thoughts. She has this insane idea that because she died, her boyfriend can't live on with out her. The very thought has her convinced that she has to kill him so they can live together at the dead school. Yeah...insane with a capitol "i".
Mars isn't your typical bad boy... at least not totally. Most of the students at the dead school see him as incorrigible and all around bad news because he is a Slider. Sliders are people who died while doing something bad and they are closer to earth then the Risers (people who died that aren't Grays, Virgins, or Sliders). Anyway, what some of the other students don't see is that he is more than just another rule-breaking Slider, but I'll let you see what I'm talking about by reading the book... overall, Mars is smart and determined. He has a habit of thinking about others since his death and that had really changed him and made him drawn him and Jana sort of closer... no matter how in denial she can be.
Avra is the kind of person that is 100% by the book. She's very disapproving of the Sliders and Jana's association with them throughout the book. She can sometimes get annoying with her "Better-not" attitude and way of trying to tell Jana what to do but she's just trying to look out for others.
Wyatt is Mars's best friend in his afterlife and it's easy to see why. With only half a face and a bad limp, he can still be funny and occasionally upbeat despite his grotesque looks.
The last character i'll talk about is....wait for it....Michael. He's still alive, don't worry. Anyway, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail because of later events. Michael seemed like a good boyfriend, from Jana's memories. Loving, loyal and all that good stuff. They seemed perfect together and they were widely known around there school and town as Webster and Haynes. It makes Jana's death all the more tragic.
As much as I liked the book, the Dead School didn't make a lot of sense. I mean, I get that it was is was designed to make dead kids to feel "normal" but where do all the dead people go who are to old for the high school scene. Not all of them can be teachers...right?
Moving on from that short rant. The ending for this book was as good as an ending can get. It ended in a way that gives the reader a sense of closure without there needing to be a sequel. But, that doesn't mean a sequel wouldn't be welcome. There's a lot of things that would be great to expand on (Mars and Jana in particular).
Well, on that note, I'll end this review by saying this book deserves the rating of B- because despite the few things I may not have liked about it, there were a lot of good things, too. The whole story was like mystery mixed with a psychological thriller mixed with a horror. Recommended for anyone who thought this book was interesting either because of my review or the synopsis, anyone who likes a good ghost story/ romance and/or someone who, like me, is/was looking for something different to read.

Otherwise by Jennifer White (Blog Tour)

Title: Otherwise

Author: Jennifer White

Release Date: 

Synopsis:
Reluctantly, Delilah Gray has returned to her childhood home--a ramshackle cottage where her compulsive, hoarding grandmother, Meema, raised her. Meema's ghostly manifestations refuse to let Delilah clean the filthy house, or to stay there peacefully. And that's just the beginning of Delilah's problems.

Lonely, angry, and hiding a painful secret, she tries to find a place for herself in a town that she once discovered was "in-between"--a portal to the worlds of the supernatural. Upon her arrival, Delilah unwittingly gets caught in the middle of important business between The Keeper, whose job it is to keep souls on the physical plane, and The Sender who helps speed the dead on their afterlife journey.

When Delilah discovers that she is connected to Lily Defoe, a woman who leapt to her death many years ago, and to a man who refers to himself as The Gravedigger for Lost Souls, she realizes there is more to her homecoming than she anticipated. Who she is, and who she's been, crosses the boundaries of life and death. Nothing--not the people she meets, not this very moment in time, not even the tragic death of her daughter--is what it appears to be. Not only does Delilah have her own "soul searching" to do, but she must work with some of Green Lake's oddest characters to uncover the mysteries of several unsolved deaths that have never been forgotten.

While strange and supernatural occurrences threaten Delilah's already fragile emotional state, she still has a crucial choice to make that will change everything. She comes to understand that there are some things that are worse than death. There is Otherwise--to be confined to a twilight state between the spiritual and the physical worlds.

Review:

Despite the fact that this is an adult book and not YA, this book is still pretty awesome. Being written in 3rd person, the world the author created in otherwise was very well explained. Most questions the reader might be having regarding the Otherwise, the Keeper, The Sender or basically anything was explained in a very...appropriate way to the reader. By that, I mean the way things were explained weren't just stated as facts randomly in the book, they were explained by the characters in different moments when explaining something in the characters life. Like flashbacks or one more experienced character explaining something to a less experienced one. In someways, a reader could complain about how the book jumps around from flashbacks to revolving around different characters, but that's what makes the book so exhilarating to read. I can honestly say that, at first, I had a hard time staying into the book, but pretty soon I could hardly stop reading.
The building of knowledge while waiting to see what happens next. It was an interesting writing style.

There is also some foreshadowing that is very ominous. One thing I can really appreciate about the author is how she uses irony very effectively. The reader knows more than the main protagonist, Delilah. We read of the interactions between the other characters and Delilah remains ignorant to it.
Speaking of characters...

Delilah had many struggles, most seeming to be about trust and loss and love. She is a very stubborn girl and, in the beginning especially, she can jump to conclusions ridiculously fast. One thing that really stood out to me was the fact that she doesn't like it when people (Shane) are able to read her easily. That brings out her defensive side...and her cussing one, too. Anyway, her character changed a lot through out the progression of the book. I won't elaborate, though, you all can find what I mean.

Shane, who we meet really early in the book, get's under Delilah's skin the second they meet. Honestly, their banter and interactions in the beginning are what really captured my attention and held me to this book. Something about shane that I find sort of funny is the fact that he can play guitar well but when he sings, yeah, cover your ears and run. Just kidding...well, not really.
Anyway I'll move on too Casimir. He and Shane obviously have history and very much detest each other, you'll learn why later on in the book. Casimir is also slightly arrogant... okay, at times he can be really arrogant, but that because of his upbringing and how he lived. He can be rude, too. When I first met him in the book, I wasn't fond of him in the least. He just doesn't come off as the greatest character attitude-wise, but he's the kind of character that starts to grow on you in the end. So it's hard to tell if he's "good" or "bad" sometimes.

When I first read of Winifred, I thought of the witch from Hocus Pocus. It's a slightly older movie for those of you deprived person's out there :P Anyway, she's a very interesting character in the book. At some points, she, like all the other major peoples in this book, becomes the main focus of the 3rd person writing. Her flashbacks help the reader understand the story more of the world the author created, like I said before.
I won't elaborate too much on the other characters, mostly because there's a good handful of them and I don't want to risk accidentally revealing some important stuff in the book. But, I will say that the characters are developed well and most of the time, the people you see as bad and good are not what you originally thought.
Well to end off this review I'll say that the ending was well played. Many questions were resolved, and there was an overall sense of happily ever after. But I sort of wish there will be a sequel. You know how it is, you never want a character's life...to....end...
Yeah... um, bad word choice....
Well, on that note, I give Otherwise a B+ as an overall rating for the interesting world the author created, devious yet captivating characters, flowing plot line and an overall interesting story. Recommended to anyone who likes mysteriousness, paranormal and supernatural aspects and otherworldly creatures.



Check out the other stops on the tour :) Links are here: http://jenniferbwhite.com/