The Between by Ryan Leslie Book Review

Hi everyone. Welcome back to Coffee Books and Rain. I'm Rachel with my coffee, with my books, and with my reviews. And we have rain today, so I am super excited to be recording on this beautifully gloomy day. I don't find rain to be gloomy; I find it to be refreshing and comforting. I don't know, I just like when it rains. So maybe I should move somewhere where it rains all the time, and then anytime I'm recording, it's probably drizzling or something.

But we are diving into a book that I realized—well, let me start from the beginning. I requested a book on NetGalley called The Garden of Before. Sounded really cool, so I was like, "Okay, let me pick that up." Well, then I go to pick up The Garden of Before and hang on just a second. I'm—before—because I go to pick it up and I realize, oh wait, I have not read the first one. Because there was kind of this little caveat that says, when I was picking it up or starting it, that I should not start this book if I have not read the first one.

I think I was starting the book in my Audible—or maybe not Audible, but it might have been on my Goodreads reader. NetGalley has a reader that you can use. Well, I think on the very first page it said, "Do not start this book if you have not read the first one." And I was like, okay, wait a minute, I hadn't read the first one. So I went on Amazon, looked it up, saw that Kindle had The Between, which is the first book of the series, and it does look like it's a duology. So that's what I'm trying to get to.

I am going to hold off on reviewing The Garden of Before so I can first give you The Between by Ryan Leslie. The Between was first published April 27th, 2021. It is approximately 397 pages, and I finished the audiobook recently. I want to say it was somewhere around 12 and a half hours or somewhere like that. We will talk about The Garden of Before later. But yes, on the very first page—it says a quick refresher for a summary of the events of book one—visit the between ryanlesley.com/refresherforthebetween. And when I did that, it was like, "Please read the first one." So I went ahead and did that.

So we're talking about The Between. While landscaping his backyard, ever conscientious Paul Apprentice discovers an iron door buried in the soil. His childhood friend, a perpetual source of mischief, Jay Lightly, pushes them to explore what's beneath. When the door slams shut above them, Paul and Jay are trapped in a between-world place of chair-like rooms and horror-story monsters, all with mysterious connections to a command-line dungeon explorer computer game from the early 90s called The Between.

Paul and Jay find themselves filling roles in a story that seems to play out over and over again. But in this world, where their roles warp their minds, the biggest threat to survival may not be the Cosmarro risen from the between’s depths to hunt them. The biggest danger may be each other.

This is considered horror, fantasy, fiction, sci-fi, and thriller. I'm not certain that I fully put it in a horror-esque category, but I definitely feel like the sci-fi thriller almost meets—yeah, like that. Like it said, the computer-game, command-line aspect. They call it ASCII or something like that. I was trying to remember the terminology they used in the actual book, but I thought this was a pretty interesting book.

Now, is it perfect? No. And the character of Jay—I just didn't like him. I just did not like Jay at all. And maybe I'm not supposed to. Maybe he is supposed to be kind of a butthead, but there was nothing really redeeming about Jay.

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