itibaren Barrichak, Bihar 824237, Hindistan
I got my reading copy from Around the World ARC Tours. Hereafter wasn’t quite what I expected. Of course, I’m not sure what I expected, but I have a big interest in books that deal with the afterlife and the in-between and such. This is just one more in a long list of “afterlife” YA that I’ve read (including If I Stay, Before I Fall, Here Lies Bridget, and – not YA – Passage). But out of all of those, Hereafter is the most paranormal one. I’m not big into ghost stories or even really believing in ghosts, but I don’t mind it too much in my fiction. And I think Tara Hudson did a good job of doing things differently. Well, from how I’ve seen ghost stories done before, at least. Amelia is our heroine, and she’s dead. We don’t know at first how she died — rather, we don’t know why she died and how it happened, specifically. We do know that she drowned. We know this because, even dead, she has nightmares of drowning, nightmares so intense that it’s the only time she feels things — feels in the sense of sound and sight and touch and panic. It haunts her. Basically, any time Amelia gets too emotional, she returns from wherever she is to the moment of her death, of the panic of drowning. It’s a great and interesting concept. Now as for the story, Amelia is dead. And the story opens with Amelia, dead, suspended in the river, as a boy, Joshua, plummets with his car into that same river off of a bridge. Though she can’t touch him and he can’t hear her, not at first, the thing she wants to do most is save him from the same fate as her own. And she does. This moment brings Amelia and Joshua close together: he becomes the only person who can see and hear her, and for her, he becomes the only thing she can touch. Once she saves him, Amelia’s death becomes more than her moving and fading through reality as a ghost. It’s an engaging story, and there are some twists and moments that caught me off guard. We meet Joshua’s grandmother, the head of a coven who take it upon themselves to banish evil spirits from their haunting. Her next target is Amelia, of course. We also meet Eli, the only other ghost Amelia meets, and he’s something dark, something much more evil than Amelia, who doesn’t feel evil at all. Besides the fact that it just isn’t my favorite genre (paranormal, supernatural), Hereafter was rather slow and long and it’s the first in a series (as, it seems, everything is these days). It was an easy, relatively enjoyable read, but it was mostly just okay for me. I did enjoy it, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t find myself too invested in the characters and story, not in the way some books lately have done for me.
comprehensive, well-written book
Different than your typical John Grisham book because it's not fiction. Very interesting, disturbing and sad at times.