Release Date: September 23, 2014
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Page Count: 599
Format: e-ARC
Darcy Patel has put college and everything else on hold to publish her teen novel, Afterworlds. Arriving in New York with no apartment or friends she wonders whether she's made the right decision until she falls in with a crowd of other seasoned and fledgling writers who take her under their wings…*an e-ARC of this book was given to me via Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and honest review*
Told in alternating chapters is Darcy's novel, a suspenseful thriller about Lizzie, a teen who slips into the 'Afterworld' to survive a terrorist attack. But the Afterworld is a place between the living and the dead and as Lizzie drifts between our world and that of the Afterworld, she discovers that many unsolved - and terrifying - stories need to be reconciled. And when a new threat resurfaces, Lizzie learns her special gifts may not be enough to protect those she loves and cares about most.
I'm not a big fan of Scott Westerfeld's other books but after hearing good things about Afterworlds and finding that it seemed really interesting I decided to try it. It turned out to be a fairly good book with a unique twist although it did drag on a bit (almost 600 pages).
Afterworlds was split into two parts, half of the book was about Darcy Patel as an author and the events before and leading up to the release of her book while the other half was about the book that she was working on. While I'm not an author, as a book blogger I've become pretty familiar with the process authors have to go through from getting their book accepted to actually published. So it was really interesting to read about the part of the book where Darcy has to go all through that + daily life and life on her own. Afterworlds was the first book I've seen where BEA was used as part of the plot and it pulled it off successfully. The second part of the book was good as well but not as interesting to me as the first part was. I felt like that part of the book was stretched out too thin to make it fit in one book alongside with the first part, it would have worked out better if it was one part for just it instead. That way more details could have added and it could have been fleshed out and in turn improved.
As for the characters, Darcy was a bit boring as a character but like I mentioned before the whole "author life" was mostly what made me like her part of the story. As for Lizzie's story she was a much better character although as the story progressed I liked her less, her powers and new abilities weren't elaborated on and parts of the story were skipped. By making her story fit into one book with Darcy's story they had to cut parts out that while weren't huge were still detrimental. Other than that nothing special about the character portion of Afterworlds, both main characters and secondary characters could have been worked on a bit more but were still good.
I took a risk with Afterworlds and it paid out, still wasn't an amazing book but still turned out to be good and MUCH better than Scott's previous books. In fact, I might even try rereading some of them because of Afterworlds and see if my thoughts have changed. This book would probably be liked by a good chunk of the YA book bloggers although I've definitely seen some that have hated it.
4/5 - Good book
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