The Blood Between Us / Zac Brewer / 274 pgs

I have to admit that I wouldn't have picked up this book if not for the fact that it fulfilled some reading challenge categories I needed to check out. On a whole, it has some things going for it. It's an interesting mystery. The narrator, Adrien, starts out as a 13 year old boy whose adopted scientist parents were just killed when their home lab blows up. His sister, Grace, who was the natural born daughter of his adopted parents, has never been kind to her adopted brother. Grace has always resented Adrian, and isn't shy about letting him know. Both are taken in by their godparents, Victor and Julian, but Adrien doesn't want to go back to the east coast boarding school that he has attended with Grace. He wants to go to a boarding school in California. Four years later, at the start of their senior year, Adrien is asked by a dying Victor to come back, and he enrolls back into his old school. His sister is still a jerk, and she's managed to make nearly everyone hate Adrian, which makes him feel like a pariah. Oddly, he is receiving text messages indicating that Grace had something to do with their parents' death. Is it true? Is Grace capable of being that horrible?

At the same time, I was not as sympathetic to Adrien as I think the author would hope. He was extremely arrogant and narcissistic, and sometimes I thought he and Grace deserved each other as siblings. Also, the resolution to the mystery surrounding the book came out of nowhere and didn't quite fit. On a whole, I give it three stars out of five, but I'm feeling generous today.