YA Review: After Life
After Life by Gayle Forman (Quill Tree Books, 272p., ages 12-up, 9780063346147)
Gayle Foreman's
After Life is an engrossing portrayal of grief and healing that revolves around a teen hit-and-run victim who comes back from heaven, hell, or "the whatever" and realizes that the lives of her loved ones have been drastically altered by her death.
Seventeen-year-old Amber Crane, "a white girl with honey-colored hair," realizes she's unsure of the day as she rides her bike home from school. When she arrives, Amber learns that she has been dead for seven years. Her at-the-time nine-year-old sister, Missy--now blue-haired and called Melissa--is almost the age Amber was when she died; Amber's mom freaks out and her atheist dad is now a believer and certain a miracle has occurred. Worse, her parents have separated, her "forever" boyfriend is a bartending, "druggy loser," and her once-close Aunt Pauline is now estranged and living in New Zealand. As Amber struggles to understand why she's come back, she begins to appreciate how her life--and her death--had far-reaching effects: on her friends, the school photographer, an English teacher, even a woman who works at a nearby pet shelter.
After Life tackles love and forgiveness, interconnectivity, and the possibility of a "different sort of existence" tangential to life and death. Foreman (
Not Nothing;
If I Stay) uses flashbacks to enrich Amber's narrative and also weaves in past and present accounts of family members, as well as people who seem at first to be only marginally involved. Earnest and absorbing,
After Life describes how one individual may touch the lives of many, in life as well as in death. --Lynn Becker, reviewer, blogger, and children's book author. Originally printed in
Shelf Awareness.
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