Review: Accidental Butterfly by Marisa Cleveland

ACCIDENTAL BUTTERFLY

by Marisa Cleveland

YA Romance

286 pages

Alive, Kate Dunlap breezed through high school with meaningless friendships and relative ease. But after an accidental overdose ends Kate’s human existence, she’s granted the opportunity of a lifetime. Return to Earth. Save Jake Barton. Prove her worth.

Success guarantees Kate an all access backstage pass to heaven. But as she falls in love for the first time, the reformed superficial social butterfly must risk her chance at redemption to guarantee Jake’s life on Earth.

MY TIDBITS

We meet Kate just after she's accidentally overdosed on drugs and now dead, is on her way to meet her guardian angel. The first moments of the story are a little confuse, but then Kate's confused herself. Still, she's quick to accept (more or less) what's going on and understands the assignment she's given. Yep, Kate has a head on her shoulders and can adjust as needed. Her attitude made her easy to like and sympathize with. I also loved the light air and humor in the story, despite the serious situation. Especially, the back and forth with her awesome guardian angel (who I'm hoping just happens to be my guardian angel too) made me laugh a few times.

The unique plot in this story grabbed my attention right away. Kate must not only figure out how to save her assignment, Jake, but must learn more about herself in the process. I, personally, would have liked to have gotten to know the pre-dead Kate a little more, so that it'd be easier to see how she changes ( a clearer comparison).

There's a lot of friendship and hope packed into these pages. Even if this is Kate's chance to prove herself, she receives quite a bit of support from the angel world. She makes friends easily while on her mission and learns to watch out for others. Even the subject of substance abuse is handled with care and doesn't take the hard nose-dive that one so often sees in literature, but rather shows the dangers even light experimenting can cause.

The romance is sweet, never edging on 'hot' and builds on friendship. I felt it could have been built out a little bit more (more tension) and was a little disappointed how Kate handled it. Her sudden decision of how to deal with her own feelings didn't seem to match with the weight of her task, and I wondered if 'heaven' would reprimand her in some way. There was just a bit of wobble in the reasoning for me here.

But even if there were a few inconsistencies and unanswered logic bunnies (especially at the end), I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. There's several good messages in the pages, a ton of good feelings, and the perfect amount of light humor to make it easy to fall in love with the characters and hope they somehow find their happy endings.