Just Another Reader

First off, I should get credit for reading two books. Because that's really what this was. 

Afterworlds has two books within its almost 600 pages. The hardcover really shows this off by having black bars on the top and bottom sections of the pages for one of the stories, so by looking at the closed book you can see which chapter is which. 

One of the storylines is about Lizzie. While waiting in Dallas Fort Worth Airport, she finds herself in the middle of a terrorist attack. While on the phone to 911, she gets the advice to play dead. Unfortunately she does this too well and slips over to the other side. She does manage to return with the help of an attractive stranger, but finds her life has completely changed. 

The other storyline is about Darcy Patel, the above storyline's author. After writing the first draft of the  book during NaNoWriMo, she sends it to an agency and gets picked up. Just around time for high school graduation, she signs a $300,000 deal for two books. Instead of going to college as planned, she decides to move to New York City to live and write her final copy and work on the draft for the second book. 

I enjoyed Darcy's storyline much more than Lizzie's. I like the fictional book within the book structure, and I can't say that I would've been happy reading a whole book about her writing and not actually getting the book. But it was difficult to get into since each chapter I had to transition to a different storyline. The fictional book does have a fantastic first chapter, which is remarked about during the book, and I thought the overall concept was interesting, I had never heard the term psycopomp before, but it fell flat for me and was not helped by the disjointed nature of the book. 

Darcy's story kept me interested in learning about the writing industry and in particular the YA market. I would definitely read another book like that.