Sublime
Author: Christina Lauren
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Paranormal | Ghosts
Released: October 14th 2014
Review Source: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
When Lucy wakes up in a frozen forest, she isn't sure why she's there, until she sees Colin.
Colin has captivated half the girls at Saint Osanna's, but no one has ever snared his fascination the way Lucy does. Even as Lucy begins to remember the details of her life–and her death–neither of them is willing to give up what they have, no matter how impossible it seems.
An adrenaline junkie, Colin begins taking himself to the brink of death, where their realities overlap–and discovers that he can physically be with Lucy. But maybe some lines shouldn't be crossed.
Sublime, where do I start? This book was absolutely beautiful! These ladies, they know what they are doing. Sublime is about Lucy and Colin, who meet at school and fall in love and like every couple they have obstacles to overcome. The unfortunate obstacle they have to overcome is that Lucy is a dead, she’s a ghost. When Lucy wakes up she can’t remember anything of her past or what she is doing back on school grounds, all she knows is that she is there to find Colin. And then we have Colin, an adrenaline seeker, who seeks the brink of death just to be able to touch and be closer to Lucy. Their story takes you on a ride.
This was a great break into the YA community for authors Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. The story kept me wanting more but scared to see how everything was going to pan out. The words these girls put together make your heart skip beats and make you feel all sorts of feels. Sublime took me up and down with Colin and Lucy’s relationship, especially with Lucy being a ghost you can’t always count on her being there. Throughout the story she would disappear for a few days or a few weeks to some unknown area, but what can you expect when you’re a ghost. When Colin finds a way to be able to get closer to Lucy and finds out where she goes when she disappears, it’s the beginning of the feelings rollercoaster with all the loops and twist and boy are there twists in this book! One thing you can count on when coming to Christina Lauren’s novels is that you will fall in so much love with their characters, especially their suave men and boys.
The best thing about Christina Lauren is you can never tell the difference between the authors, they are the perfect writing duo. They also have accomplished switching point of views perfectly. I am not the biggest fan of switching between male and female because some authors can’t do it, but these two; they do it well and make both of the characters believable.
Sublime is a must read! It takes you on a rollercoaster on a haunting ride. Lucy and Colin were a great introduction for the YA world for Christina Lauren. The girls proved to us that they can write steamy men, and they just proved to us that they can write lovable teenager too. Can we get more? I can’t wait to have my physical copy of this book to read all over again. Bravo ladies, bravo.
Guest Post About Deciding to Write About Ghosts
The best ideas aren’t usually ones that start with, “I should write a ghost story.” They’re usually the ones that put a bunch of bits of inspiration in a pot and let them cook together.
We started writing together in 2009. We had finished a story and were in the midst of the querying process, when during a random phone call, Lo (who also happens to have a PhD in Neuroscience! <Christina wrote that) mentioned a conversation she’d had with her boss.
The two were discussing a recurring frustration over the lack of creativity in disease research: every early-stage drug people were getting excited about worked, in essence, because they shut down cell functioning. This looked great in cellular models of disease but would never work in humans.
“It’s like that urban legend of the kid up in Nova Scotia who fell in a frozen lake and stopped breathing from the shock,” her boss said. “The story says he was revived a few hours later, but because everything had sort of shut down, he was totally fine. We just can’t put the system in a frozen lake to protect it.”
Cryogenics is murky science at best, and neither Lauren nor her boss could find the ‘real’ story anywhere about the boy in the lake, but it was the perfect metaphor.
And it also sparked an idea.
What If a boy fell in love with a ghost, and they could touch, but not really? He’s a daredevil, has used up all of what the universe would call his nine lives, and while goofing around on a frozen glacial lake one day… he falls in? What if?
We were still working full time at our day jobs. Christina was seeing all of the real-life, day-to-day drama of teenage love and family and tragedy and friendships working in a junior high counseling office. She was seeing firsthand how teenagers come together in a bond that feels urgent, and real, and forever.
What if we took that, and pulled in a little science, playing with one of Lo’s favorite scientific concepts—sublimation—where a solid turns to a gas without ever going through a liquid phase, to get our title: Sublime. We loved the legend of the White Lady, the Lucy poems by William Wordsworth and were both huge fans of the movies Flatliners and Ghost.
So we put them all together. Like we said before, sometimes the best ideas aren’t sparked by one thing, but several ideas that layer themselves, one on top of the other.
Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of long-time writing partners/besties/soulmates/brain-twins Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. The coauthor duo writes both Young Adult and Adult Fiction, and together has produced seven New York Times bestselling novels. Their books have been translated into 22 languages. (Some of these books have kissing. Some of these books have A LOT of kissing.)
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*sigh* It's such a pretty book.
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