I know this book cover looks a little . . . um . . . racy? . . . gritty? . . . dark? . . . for a blog about children’s books. I read the book on my Kindle and completely forgot what the cover looked like. It’s a dark cover and, yes, the book is dark. It’s not a YA book, either.
Still. Teenagers will like the book as well as adults do, so I’m reviewing it here.
Afterlife, by Merrrie Destefano, is a gripping, fast-moving tale of life after life. The book is set in New Orleans in the future, in a world where people can be uploaded into clone bodies upon death. Those people—stringers they are called—can live nine lives before they finally die for good. In this world there are also one-timers—those who believe it is appointed unto man once to die.
But why would you want to face your Maker after nine lives? If you don’t want to die once, you probably won’t ever want to die. So it wouldn’t be surprising to find some people looking for ways to cheat death more than nine times.
The book opens with Chaz, one of the heirs to the Fresh Start dynasty. Fresh Start being the huge corporation that provides people with shiny new lives each time they die. Chaz has a newly animated clone with him, a young woman—an old woman, newly made young, I mean—and he must protect her while she gets back her memory and learns how to navigate the world.
Add to this interesting scenario the fact that since people are living so much longer, it’s illegal to have children unless you have a death certificate from someone who has died—died and stayed dead—so children are precious and sought after and kidnapped and sold on the black market.
The story was intriguing from the opening page. Destefano kept up a breakneck pace by throwing all kinds of danger and questions onto the pages. I had to keep reading to find out who was after the good guys and why.
Besides conflict that dragged me in, this book has great voice.
Here are a couple of snippets:
The city melted around us as one narrow fog-drenched street bled into another.
It was well past midnight in my tiny corner of the universe, sometime between rest for the weary and insomnia for the troubled. And yet—elsewhere on earth’s canvas—dawn painted gray skies; sherbet colors layered the horizon; and the earth waited to run a rough tongue over the flavors of tomorrow.
It’s not just pretty writing. It fits the tone of the book. It’s gritty. There is insomnia for the troubled and the tongue is rough. The streets are fog-drenched and bleeding. The author sets the mood so well and makes you believe:
He was high on stims. I could smell it like the inside of a rusty can.
The writing puts you right there in that world.
What I loved best about the story, though, was the fact that this dark book had so much depth and along with the depth there was hope. This book provokes thought. What happens to us when we die? If you could live for five hundred years, would you? What happens to the family unit when people jump into cloned bodies, leaving their old lives behind? And if there are people in the world thinking about these things instead of blindly buying the latest high, the latest toy, the latest bit of must-have stuff being pushed by greedy corporations, there is hope.
Weaknesses? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily call this a weakness, but perhaps Destefano’s wonderful voice tripped her up a tiny bit. I would have loved it if Angelique’s voice was a little more distinct. The only reason I say that is that I started one chapter and it opened with such a lovely metaphor that I just assumed I was reading Chaz’s thoughts. I was a little shocked on the next page to find out it was Angelique’s head I was in. And that made me realize that they both came up with great metaphors. That’s pretty rare—to find two people in one city who think in such visual terms.
I’m not sure that qualifies as a weakness, because the picturesque writing was so enjoyable. But it was about all I could come up with as I was reading along. The pages were flying by so fast that I really wasn’t finding anything to complain about. And I loved the Gutterspeak accent. I really liked the way that speech characterized certain people, and I liked that working men and druggies alike spoke with that accent. The author used these things to build a believable world and to drag me into it.
I liked the characters, I wanted them to succeed, the writing was lovely, the story was compelling…I highly recommend this one for teens who love dark/vampire/zombie stories. This is not a vampire or a zombie story—if it was, I wouldn’t have read it. It’s sci-fi. But readers who like thrills and chills and demons lurking on the outer edges, will love Afterlife, I’m pretty sure.
