The Everafter by Amy Huntley

4 stars -- I liked it!

The Everafter is a really quick read. It took me less than three hours and only one sitting (yay for lazy Saturday afternoons!).

The book starts with a girl in a large seemingly empty space. She realizes she's dead, but she doesn't know who she is, how she died, or even how she knows she's dead. Without a way to note the passage of time, it's hard to pinpoint how long she stays in her bubble before she begins exploring the area she's in, which she's nicknamed Is, but eventually she does.

Learning to expand the bubble that encompasses what remains of her (is she a ghost? is she a soul?) and move through Is, the girl starts traveling toward little pinpoints of light she can barely see in the darkness.

It turns out that each pinpoint is an object, and each object, when touched, brings Madison to a point in her life where she lost that object. Able to view the scene from outside her body or to join with her body and relive the moment, Madison learns who she is, who her friends are, and relearns about the love of her life, Gabe.

Madison makes it her goal to find out how she, and, she's pretty sure, Gabe, died at the age of 17, but no object brings her to that scene. She learns that she can change the outcome of the scenes by either finding the object (after which she can no longer visit that moment) or moving other little things around but also realizes that doing so changes the fabric of who she was.

The Everafter is a fascinating look into one person's take on how life after death might be, and the puzzle found within the story is quite captivating--will Madison find Gabe? How did Madison die? What is Madison's best friend's place in all of this? The outcome, while not exactly surprising and a little far fetched, is satisfying and the steps that led to the ending are clearly defined in retrospect. I'm pretty sure the letter at the end made me tear up a little bit.

The only complaint I have about the book is that the the Everafter, which the dead can go to and leave at any time, is a little vague and doesn't sound very pleasant to me. But I suppose heaven is a bit hard to describe, and everybody has their own ideas about how it will be.