Unraveling by Elizabeth Norris

Janelle thought she had a lot going on in her life. Her father is an FBI agent, her mother is fading away - living in a shell, so Janelle has been taking care of her 14-year-old brother Jared.

And to add to Janelle's problems, she gets hit by a truck that came out of nowhere and dies by the impact.

Only she wakes up... And Ben Michaels is standing over her, a boy she has never talked to before. But Janelle knows, deep down inside, that Ben brought her back to life.

And she's set to prove it one way or another.

There happens to be more that's going on besides Janelle dying. There are people in her town that are dying from radiation burns - horrible burns. Only no one can find out who these people are. There are no records about them; the Feds can't even get a match on their dental records.

Janelle and her best friend Alex like to snoop in her father's FBI cases, so they get in a little too deep in this radiation case.

And find out that there is a bomb ticking down to 40 days before it blows up... Which will destroy Earth.

But then Janelle finds out Ben's secret... And it links to her father's FBI cases...

After her father was killed by 3 gunshots, Janelle is even more determined to figure out this case.

Because solving this case could mean the survival of the whole planet. And finding out her father's killer.

My Thoughts/Reflections
I tagged this as a science fiction novel because it does go into alternate universes and non-human abilities. This is also one of the very few Young Adult science fiction novels I have read and I was really impressed with it!

Janelle is a character that I really liked. She was the head of the house since both of her parents were MIA - in person and in spirit. That's enough for a 17-year-old to handle with a younger brother.

But she also wanted to help her father in his cases before he died. And she caught on to certain aspects very quickly that even her father was impressed - and he was in charge of his own group in the FBI.

While I'm not a sciencey person, I was sucked into this story and wanted to know all of the answers to the mysteries in this novel. And the author, Elizabeth Norris, wrote it well enough for a non sciencey person to understand, which I really appreciated!

I do have to warn any interested readers - this is a sad novel. I can count right now 4 sad parts to this book, and most of them were right at the end.

So it's a tearjerker, but good news is that there will be a second novel coming out in this series. It won't be out until April 2013, but we will get to delve more into the world that Norris has created and maybe get some happy news rather than crying some more.

I definitely recommend this novel to anyone wanted a "forbidden" love with a bad boy, a science fiction setting, or a novel about survival.