ARC Review & Giveaway - My Last Kiss by Bethany Neal

Title: My Last Kiss

Author: Bethany Neal

Release Date: June 10, 2014

Pages: 368

Goodreads Rating: 3.87/5 Stars

My Rating: 4/5 Stars

My Content Rating: YA (Nothing more than kissing, Some violence)
Genre: YA Paranormal

Summary from Goodreads:  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.

My Last Kiss is an intriguing YA paranormal murder mystery.  Cassidy doesn't remember anything from the few weeks leading up to her death.  But, when she wakes up dead, she knows she didn't kill herself - but as she untangles the memories leading up to her death, she's afraid that she won't like what she ultimately finds.

The negatives:

• Beginning felt drawn out.  The beginning of this book felt just a little bit long to me.  There were tons of mysteries in the book and I found myself a bit confused and very slightly bored at times in the beginning of the book as information is given out in small, somewhat confusing doses.  This is purposeful, but I just felt like we could have been given a couple of more significant clues earlier on to tide us over.  Once I got to the second half of the book (or perhaps even a bit earlier), things really picked up, though, and I found that I couldn't put the book down!

What I loved:

• The mysteries.  Like I said above, this book was full of mysteries - not just who killed Cassidy (if anyone did), but what was happening between Cassidy and Ethan just before her death. The more that Cassidy learns, the more she realizes that the secrets don't even end there - more people may have been keeping things from her than she ever imagined. As the mysteries unwound, I was drawn in further and further.  By the second half of the book, I couldn't put it down!  (And I didn't - I stayed up way too late!)
• Cassidy.  I really felt for Cassidy.  She experiences a painful death and then wakes up as a ghost, having no idea what happened to her.  Of course, she wants to find out.  But the more she learns, the more she realizes that nothing is what she thought - she can't even trust herself.  She starts to believe she may have even cheated on the boy she loves. Now if you read my reviews, you know that cheating is a touchy issue with me.  I can't stand it when we're supposed to root for the cheating couple to get together.  But that never felt like the case here.  I don't want to say too much, but I actually felt happy with the way it was all handled and with how maturely Cassidy dealt with all of her questions about her relationships.
• Ethan.  LOVED Ethan.  I especially loved that, even though we get the feeling that things were difficult between Ethan and Cassidy before she died, he was still putting her first - even in death. The romance between Ethan and Cassidy was so sweet, and I hated to imagine that anything may have happened to mess things up between them.  And I REALLY hated the idea that Ethan could have had anything to do with her death.  I didn't want to believe it for a minute, but it was definitely hard to know what to believe.  There were no easy answers - everyone was a suspect.

My Last Kiss was a fantastic mystery filled with intrigue!  A great read!  I give it 4/5 stars.

***Disclosure: This book was provided to me by the author in exchange for an honest review. No other compensation was given. All opinions are my own***

About the Author

Bethany Neal writes young-adult novels with a little dark side and a lot of kissing from her Ann Arbor, Michigan home. She is obsessed with (but not limited to): nail polish, ginormous rings, pigs, pickles, and dessert.

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.

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