Meridian- Amber Kizer

I will give you fair warning, this book review may be biased, as it has such a special place in my heart. 

*******

My name is Meridian Sozu. 

I am a Fenestra. 

I have always shared my world with the dead and the dying. 

But I really didn't understand what that meant until I turned sixteen and glimpsed my own mortality. . .
Sixteen-year-old Meridian has always been surrounded by death. 
As a child, insects, mice, and salamanders burrowed into her bedclothes to die. As she grew, the animals got bigger, and soon they were finding her at school to die in her presence. Meridian became an outcast, labeled by her classmates as Reaper, Gravedigger, and Witch. Each death she witnesses weakens her body, and loneliness weakens her spirit.
On her sixteenth birthday, she witnesses a deadly car crash. Though she’s untouched, Meridian's body explodes with the victims’ pain.

Before she can fully recover, Meridian is told that she's a danger to her family and rushed to her great-aunt's house in Revelation, Colorado. It's there that she learns the secret her mother has been hiding her entire life: that she is a Fenestra, the half-angel, half-human link between the living and the dead. It's crucial that she learn how to transition human souls to the afterlife and preserve the balance between good and evil on earth. But Meridian and her sworn protector, Tens, face great danger from the Aternocti, a band of dark forces who capture vulnerable souls on the brink of death and cause chaos. 

Dark, lovely, and lushly romantic, MERIDIAN introduces a powerful heroine who will entrance readers.

So read this I read it a while ago, back in 2009, and then read the follow up, Wildcat Fireflies about a year ago, maybe.  I loved everything about this book, Meridian was an amazing story about strength and death. I love this book, I loved Tens,  I loved his name, his sarcasm and his stone persona, and then I loved the simple relationship that developed between them, where they could sleep side by side without being completely sex-crazy, which I felt was a rarity within YA fiction. 

Meridian is followed by death. 
Animals and bugs come to her to die, she was always frail, and weak, she was always sick, and at school nobody talked to her because they thought she was a witch, she was an outcast and lost, not just at school but at home, where her mother and father were wary of her and the way things seemed to die around her. The only person she really felt close with was her younger brother, who she treasured beyond everything. 

 On her sixteenth birthday, as she's about to leave for school when she witnesses a car crash, all three people are immediately killed. Meridian was standing in front of her house when she was suddenly crippled by the pain of the car crash, but it didn't touch her. 

Meridian's body ignites in a flurry of pain and agony. That is when she's taken away, dropped off at the train station, told her family is in danger because of her, and told that she had to leave her little brother and go to her great Aunt's house.

***

This is a dark, haunting, resonating book. 

I found the characters were realistic, and were all very distinct from one another. 
They didn't blur into each other. 
Most of all, I loved this book so much because of the story and the strength of her, and the ideas on death that are introduced here.


Honestly, Amber Kizer has to be one of my favorite writers, I recommend this book to pretty much anyone, any young girls would just be over the moon about this fantastic book.