The Girl In Between is Book 1 of a quartet. The premise is very interesting: main character, Byrn, has what is called Klein-Levin Syndrome (KLS). In addition to the normal kind of sleeping we all do – 6-9 hours out of every 24 –  she may pass out, anywhere, any time, and sleep for anywhere from several days to several months.

Not only that, while she’s asleep, she is actually doing things – eating, getting dressed, brushing her teeth, etc. – but she has no memory of them when she wakes up. So, she might wake up 20 pounds heavier or rail thin, or with scars she can’t explain. However, her mother has to turn her periodically during an episode to prevent bed sores. This is not the only point Ms. Kemp is inconsistent on.

While asleep, Bryn enters a dream state that is more of an alternate reality, and this is not common for KLS patients. In one such “dream,” she meets a boy, who eventually remembers his name is Roman. He’s always there now when she has an episode and they fall in love. He is real, but they have never met in the real world.

Despite it’s annoying inconsistencies, it’s an intriguing story. Ms. Kemp never makes the mistake of giving the reader all the answers at once. A lot of writers are afraid to do that. They don’t trust the reader to be able to figure it out on the fly. Ms. Kemp, however, keeps moving and challenges the reader to keep up.

Ms. Kemp can turn a phrase. She describes what it’s like for her the first time she tries to walk again after a long episode: “Those first few steps were always shaky, muscles remembering to contract, blood trailing down to places that felt numb enough to cut off.” For an omnipotent 3rd-person narrator, it’s fine to write like that. But she has her characters talking like that, and people don’t do that. And Roman and Bryn speak the exact same way, there is no distinction between the characters.

She also makes the end a real cliff-hanger, which, while very unsatisfying, is a great tool and Ms. Kemp uses it well. But none of this means she’s a good writer.

She uses words in a unique way, which I applaud, but they still have to make sense. She often has tears carving down someone’s face. Tears don’t carve. They course, they pour, they slide, they spill, they do a lot of things, but they don’t carve. Every time she says that, I have this image of the tears actually cutting into the face as they fall.

And people sink an awful lot. Which would be fine but for two things. First, you really have to use more than one verb in a whole book to describe an action. Second, she doesn’t use the past tense properly. She’ll say, “He sunk into the couch.” The correct word is sank. Or, “He had sunk…” I know that may not bother most people the way it does me, but she uses that same verb even more often that she has tears carving down people faces. I have to think that gets annoying whether you catch the grammatical error or not.

That said, I know many people are not at all bothered by things like that, if they even notice them. For those people, this book is a great choice.