Review for Remembrance

Title: Remembrance
Author: Michelle Madow
Publication Date: July 27, 2011
Source: Borrowed
Summary (from Goodreads):

 Lizzie Davenport has been reincarnated from Regency Era, England ... but she doesn't know it yet.

Then Drew Carmichael transfers into Lizzie's high school at the beginning of the year, and she feels a connection to him, almost like she knows him. She can't stop thinking about him, but whenever she tries talking with him about the mysteries behind her feelings, he makes it clear that he wants nothing to do with her. Reaching him is even more difficult because she has a boyfriend, Jeremy, who has started to become full of himself after being elected co-captain of the varsity soccer team, and her flirtatious best friend Chelsea starts dating Drew soon after his arrival. So why can't she get him out of her mind?

Even though Lizzie knows she should let go of her fascination with Drew, fighting fate isn't going to be easy.

                                                                    Review

I’m actually (slightly) embarrassed how eagerly I devoured this book. As a woman who is closer to thirty than twenty, I think I should be over the high school drama that I left behind a decade ago. But from the first paragraph Remembrance drew me in, sucking all ability out of me to do anything but sit there and read the book from beginning to end in one sitting.

It was a love/hate relationship with the characters. I disliked Jeremy instantly and thought Chelsea was too self-absorbed, a typical attention whore. She irked me from the very beginning, too. Drew annoyed me with his hot/cold attitude towards Lizzie, and I thought his character was a little too predictable.  I really didn’t like how Liz accept the way Jeremy treated her, and thought early on that she was going to be the typical high school girl who took the crappy words he dealt and just sucked it up because, as we all know, high school is all about the boyfriend. I’m glad I was wrong about her and she grew a backbone.

The thing is, while reading the book I kept being reminded of Twilight. Drew’s “we shouldn’t be friends” “it will end badly if we are” “I’m tired of lying to you” was like reading Edward all over again. I kept waiting for him to pop up and say, “Oh by the way, I’m a vampire.” I’m not a Twilight saga fan, so the fact that I didn’t throw this book across the room says more than words ever will.

I adore the idea of past lives, which is one of the reasons I caved into the peer pressure and picked up Remembrance. I think the author did a great job in the story telling. Even though the plot wasn’t very original, and some of it made me think of the movie Kate and Leopold, it was a fun read. I did start to lose the enthusiasm I had in the beginning of the book towards the middle however, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the rest of the book.