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When Ondine Mason’s parents move to Chicago, they allow her to stay behind, in Portland, Oregon, to finish out her last year of high school. She plans to chill out and look for a summer job and take the art class offered by Raphael Inman. But first she plans a party. There, she meets a strange man named James Motherwell, also known as Moth, and things get weird, dragging her into something she wants no part of.
Morgan D’Amici lives in a house that’s one step above a trailer. She’s poorer than her friends, but she tries desperately to pretend she’s not. Plus, she’s different, but she doesn’t know why. Then her childhood sleepwalking habit resurfaces, and she wakes up with muddy feet, hair tangled with leaves and twigs, with no memory of where she’s been or what she did.
Nix Saint-Michael fled Alaska, trying to outrun and hide a peculiar gift he hates. Whenever he sees someone with a ring of light around them, he knows that person is about to die. He has no idea how to stop it, so he gets addicted to dust—a mild drug that helps him relax, keeps bad dreams at bay, and lessens the light. His drug use gets him kicked out of the squat where he was living, and he ends up rooming with Ondine after the strange party at her house.
Ondine, Morgan, and Nix are intertwined in something that goes far beyond the ordinary world. When they come together at a secret rave in the woods, everything and nothing makes sense—and their lives become endangered.
Betwixt is young adult literature with a darker and edgier storyline. Ms. Smith mixes fantasy with the shady underworld of cults and drugs, bringing to life a compelling story of three seventeen-year-olds fighting their way through the confusion of who they are and where their future lies.
Though it’s geared toward a teen audience, Betwixt contains a fair amount of bad language, drug and alcohol use by minors, and references to sex. But none of those things are glamorized; in fact, it tends to cause the teens more problems than they bargained for.
Betwixt ended a bit too abruptly for me, and it left me feeling like I’d missed something. I didn’t feel as though problems were completely solved for the characters, and some of the storylines seemed too rushed in the end. But, despite the hurried ending, Betwixt is still an appealing read that keeps you engaged in the story right up to the end.
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