Imposter by Jill Hathaway

Imposter by Jill Hathaway is the sequel to Slide, which I read back in 2012. The series (or duology, I suppose) is about a girl who can "slide" into other people's heads and see what they're doing and (spoiler for the first book) take control of their actions temporarily.

What if a killer took control of you?

Vee Bell’s gift (or curse) of “sliding”—slipping into the mind of another person and experiencing life, briefly, through his or her eyes—has been somewhat under control since she unwillingly witnessed the horrific deaths of her classmates six months ago.

But just as things are getting back to normal, Vee has a very bizarre experience: she loses consciousness and finds herself in a deserted area, at the edge of a cliff, with the broken body of the boy who took advantage of her on the rocks below.

As Vee finds herself in stranger and stranger situations with no memory of getting there, she begins to suspect that someone she knows has the ability to slide—and that this “slider” is using Vee to exact revenge on his or her enemies.

I have to say, Slide was too many books ago for me to remember much about it other than the premise and that I enjoyed it. Luckily, the recap at the start of Imposter was both unobtrusive and sufficient to orient me to the world and characters again. The story in Imposter is set about six months after Slide which, I'm pretty sure, puts it in the same school year. But instead of worrying about prom, like Vee belatedly realises everyone else has been, Vee worries about loosing consciousness at an inopportune moment. But then, instead of blacking out and sliding into someone else, Vee starts blacking out and doing things she can't remember, almost as though she's the one being controlled by another slider.

The gist of the plot is Vee trying to work out what's happening to her while dealing with the creepy guy that tried to rape her at Homecoming (the dance) and her late mother's long-lost sister, who comes visiting out of the blue. The book deals with sexual assault between teenagers a bit, but does not delve into the issue in a huge amount of depth. Hathaway showed us some different responses from victimised girls and their friends but I felt like the message she was trying to convey got lost somewhere along the way. The story pulled its punches too much, in that respect. It's easy enough to agree that "that guy is a dangerous jerk", but then another character starts feeling sorry for him because of his family situation and I didn't feel Imposter went into enough depth on that aspect.

It wasn't a very long book and certainly not one that was at all difficult to read (I mention sexual assault but neither of the girls mentioned actually know what happened and you certainly don't see it on the page). The different plot lines are intertwined nicely and there was even one slightly surprising revelation. I did think that near the end everything wrapped up a bit too quickly. The neat ending was appropriate, but some plot elements were glossed over a bit too quickly, I found.

Anyway, Imposter was a fun light read which made a nice break from more serious short stories I've been reading lately. The series overall is enjoyable, quick and easy to read, but with a few darker streaks (people do have a tendency to die or almost die and the first book was about murder). I recommend it to fans of YA looking for something to fill in some time.

4 / 5 stars

First published: 2013, Harper Collins
Series: Slide book 2 of 2 (or at least, I can't find any evidence of further books)
Format read: iBooks ePub
Source: Purchased from iTunes a while ago

Slide by Jill Hathaway

Slide by Jill Hathaway was a book I almost bought at Heathrow during my stupidly long layover. I was able to talk myself out of it at the time because a) I’d just bought a pile of books in the US and and b) I opened it to a random page in the middle and it seemed a little bit shallow. Then later c) I bought a Kobo.

But now I seem to be on some sort of YA binge and ran out of pre-purchased YA so I downloaded the sample/preview of Slide and one thing led to another, I bought it and kept flipping those iPhone pages until I got to the end. Needless to say, I enjoyed it.

Slide is about Vee, a teenage girl (I think aged 17), who has a magical form of narcolepsy. When she passes out, she slides into someone else’s head for a few minutes. She can’t read their mind, but does see and experience life from their point of view. The choice of who she slides into is determined by what she was touching at the time; if she touches something which had some sort of emotional significance to another person, she’ll probably slide into their heads. Because she can’t read minds, she often doesn’t know who she’s slid into unless there’s a clue in the new environment or unless she knows what object brought on the episode.

Things aren’t exactly going well for Vee with mild injuries brought on by the narcolepsy interspersed and night-time insomnia to top it all off. But then she slides into the head of a murderer just after they’ve committed the crime. A cheerleader is dead and because the killer made it look like suicide, Vee is the only one who knows it’s murder.

And so, between boys being confusing, girls being bitchy and her sister (friends with the dead girl) falling apart, Vee realises it’s up to her to work out who the killer is. She can’t tell anyone else about it, because they’ll just think she’s crazy.

This book had be guessing at whodunit until the end. I was wondering “oh, could it be that person? Surely not, but that does look very suspicious” right along with Vee and I couldn’t stop reading until I got to the end. Far from being shallow, as per my first impression, the book works much better in context. It’s written in a fairly straight-forward style but from the (first person) point of view of a teenager, this is quite appropriate.

There were some parallels between Vee and Veronica Mars. Both outcasts, both have male BFFs and pasts that aren’t all sunshine and roses. Vee is slightly less awesome (and less immediately proactive at trying to solve all the mysteries) but that’s not an entirely fair comparison since Veronica Mars is my favourite teenage girl character ever. What I did enjoy about Vee was watching her take control of her life by deciding to find the killer. Throughout the book she gains agency and becomes less of a victim of her condition. Which was nice to read about.

In short, this was an enjoyable read. If you’re after some YA mystery and murder, this is a good place to start.

4 / 5 stars