Let's chat about the two worlds of Afterlove

 

Afterlove by Tanya Byrne, that’s the book I’m talking about today, and I’ll be honest, it’s one of those that I have no idea where I saw it first. I think I might have bought it in a physical store, but I genuinely don’t remember.

The old blurb says: Car headlights. The last thing Ash hears is the snap of breaking glass as the windscreen hits her and shatters into a million pieces like stars. But she made it, she’s still here. Or is she? This New Year’s Eve, Ash gets an invitation from the afterlife she can’t decline: to join a clan of fierce girl reapers who take the souls of the city’s dead await their fate. But Ash can’t forget her first love, Poppy, and she will do anything to see her again… even if it means they only get a few more days together. Dead or alive…

We open up on a prologue with Ash (Ashana Persaud) picking up this girl, Alice, who has just died. It took me moment to understand everyone’s position and the voice and where/who everyone was. But I got the vibe that this was the point where Ash is a reaper. It’s a short chapter that then ends and we go to a bit titled “before” where the actual numbered chapters start.

The actual chapter one has Ash going on a school trip to a windfarm, that she has to get on a boat for, and homegirl is struggling. She ends up talking with this girl from another school on the boat, it ends up being Poppy, and the chapter ends with her giving Ash her number. Slay. Ash spends the second chapter, these first few chapters are pretty short by the way, but she spends the second chapter basically losing her mind over the concept of Poppy.

Something I’ll mention before I mention any more about anything else, the pacing of this book wasn’t what I was expecting. I thought that the whole being dead and being a reaper would happen at a different point in the book. I thought, or expected, that it would come a lot earlier than it actually ended up doing. Because, and for lack of better phrasing, Ash spends a solid forty percent of the book alive. I know that sounds horrible when I write it like that, but I didn’t know how else to say it. But I just assumed that the dying would happen earlier for Ash. However, I think it was a good choice that it didn’t, because it meant that she got time to live, if that makes sense? She had time to be set up as a character, and for her life to exist before it was taken – she gets 150 pages of life.

I really liked Ash and her family. It was her, her mum, dad and sister, Rosh. They actually felt like real people, rather than just cut outs of people, it was like the author actually knew what a certain kind of person was really like. A wild concept. But you get to see Ash and Poppy on their first date, and my god, Ash is such a sixteen-year-old. Like, she fully wonders whether Poppy is going to be the one. And I get that some people marry their high school sweethearts, but it’s just so… I don’t know how else to describe it other than as so teenager. I know that’s not grammatically correct, but Ash reacts exactly the way you’d expect a sixteen-year-old to. And to be honest, both the girls are like this. It’s very, well, as the blurb says, first love. It’s very intense, I suppose because it’s something that neither of the characters will have experienced before. And you also get a good sense of this about 100 pages in when someone – just an unnamed character – ends up getting stabbed in the vicinity of Ash and Poppy.

Anyway, then Ash dies. The blurb made it seem like she had more of a choice in becoming a reaper, but in the book, it happens that she was the last person of the year to die, so she becomes the reaper for her parish, which in her case in sudden deaths in teens. And naturally, the tone of the book massively changes once she dies. I should say, it would probably be weird if it didn’t. But the before section read a lot more like a typical contemporary YA book, whereas the after part felt like a completely different book. I’ve got to admit that even Ash and Poppy felt like different characters in the after section too.

So, to go back to an earlier bit, that prologue that I mentioned where Ash sees this girl, Alice Anderson, you actually end up seeing that in the context of the book. I assumed it would turn up at some point, since when you read it, it does read as though Ash is a reaper. But it was nice to see it turn up. It’s like in movies or TV shows when they open on some really dramatic scene, like maybe a big fight, and then the show builds up to that. It was sort of like that, except less dramatic, and I believe that it was Ash’s first solo reaping, if I’m not mistaken.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the chapter breaks in this book. Something cute was that in the before section, they were done with hearts, and in the after, they were done with scythes. That was a cute detail, but sometimes, I felt like they were used and then too much time would pass. I noticed this more in the after section. One example came in the earlier moments in the after section, when Ash is adjusting to her new situation, but then there’s a chapter break that accounts for like a week, and I just felt like stuff would have happened in that week. And maybe part of the point of the after section is that loss of what Ash had when she was alive, but there were a few times as I read that I did feel like I was missing out on something. It wasn’t a common thing, but I definitely noticed it a couple of times.

While I liked everything that was in the book, I feel like something that just comes with the territory of the kind of book this is – with having one section when Ash is alive and then one when she is dead – it inherently means that you don’t get the chance to spend the whole book in one, for lack of better phrasing, world. I say that since Ash’s world when she was alive and when she was dead, even though she was in the same place, was completely different. I definitely liked the world when Ash was alive better than when she was dead, I feel like it was definitely set up stronger. That might also have something to do with the fact that you get told reapers lose access to senses like smell and taste, so a lot of the world was cut off, especially since when Ash was alive, she talks about food a fair bit. Additionally, I did feel like Ash kind of lost a chunk of her personality when she died as well. Like, in the after section, she wasn’t nearly as compelling as she was in the before section. I know that I did say earlier that I liked how long you spent with Ash while she was alive, because it let you get to know her before she lost her life, but, I don’t know, I do feel like the set-up could maybe have been done quicker, or she could have did quicker, and more time could have been sent setting up the after section.

So, for me, I’m mixed overall. I think since the world started out so colourful, and that was slowly drained as it went on, I definitely didn’t enjoy it as much towards the end. However, I understand that things had to change once Ash died. For me, had she maybe retained even just her sense of smell, I think some of the feeling from when she was alive could have been retained – I feel like it would have also really helped for the ending as well.

Okay, bye!