My Last Kiss
by Bethany Neal
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: June 10th 2014

Synopsis:

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.

I have always gravitated to YA novels that have some semblance of a mystery. I have always loved mysteries and the fact that a good one will keep me reading, even if other parts of the book fall flat. My Last Kiss has a great mystery, it follows a young girl names Cassidy who dies by falling off a bridge behind one of her best friends homes. The police and everyone else thinks it is suicide but Cassidy does not pass over, she becomes ghost and tries to help her friends solve her mysterious death.

Bethany Neal has beautiful writing. The way she strings words together is beautiful and i loved reading her writing very much. But I did find that the beauty of her writing took away from the story a bit for me. I was so focused on what she was saying that I wasn't really reading, if you know what I mean. I think Bethany has an amazing talent and since this is her first novel her talent can only grow over time.

The characters in My Last Kiss were interesting to read. I think My favorite duo was Cassidy and her boyfriend Ethan. Their relationship before and after her death (did I mention that Ethan can see Cassidy? that part was a great way to keep the story going) was great because you could see the difference in them as characters and the growth that seemed to happen over the course of a few days. Their love story was a weird one, and certainly one with mistakes that I personally did not like, but I liked that they seemed to connect more after she died then before. I found that very interesting to read. As for the other characters in the book, I wasn't so fond of them. I don't really know why, I could not really connect with any f them on a personal level therefore I had no interest in what happened to them. What I did appreciate was the fact that every character in the book had a purpose that was revealed at the end of the book. I loved that.

Overall My Last Kiss was a great mystery that kept you wanting to read from start to finish. There were some slow parts in the middle that left me wanting more but ultimately it was Cassidy and Ethan that kept me reading. Their relationship was a great thing to read and I think that Bethany Neal has a great future in the YA world.