Afterworlds

"It was good, I liked that I felt like I was reading her book while she was writing it. Both of the stories in this book have great plot lines and pulled me along til the end. It’s safe to say this book has “the juice”. LOL "

"I loved how it was written. The story follows an author and her writing process, but the amazing part is we get to read the story as she’s writing it! It’s like two different perspectives, but it just with two different stories. "

"Afterworlds is a book told in two storylines -- the first, that of Darcy Patel, the author of the book Afterworlds, who writes the book in a month during high school and is very quickly picked up by a publisher. She puts college on hold, and moves to New York to write the rest of the series and get some serious exposure to the writing world; the other, that of her protagonist, Lizzie, who finds she can move between the world of the living and the world of the dead following a terrorist attack, and who just wants to make things work, protect her friends, and maybe have a little more to do with this mysterious boy she's met in the other world.<br/><br/>Unfortunately, I had to put this book down at around 40%, because both Darcy and Lizzie were just too shallow for me to deal with well, and that's fair, because I'm not the target audience. I was gritting my teeth during Darcy's portions of the book because it was just too... you know, handwavey. She's hanging out with tons of authors, and it's all so easy... I ended up looking forward to Lizzie's parts of the book, but even then, there were times I just wanted to yell, "Dude, really? Don't be a *******." After too many of those, I realized I just wasn't enjoying myself and moved on. Again, I am not the target audience -- a mid-teen range would be very much at home in this book.<br/><br/>Related: I am very, very glad to see young adult starting to look at nontraditional relationships and sexual orientations. Kudos, Mr. Westerfeld."

"This book was so long! I found it to be dragging a bit, but mostly just for Darcy's story. I was more invested in Lizzie's story and I just wanted to skip to her chapters instead of reading Darcy's. <br/><br/>Overall, the book was good, it was just so long and I felt that some chapters were fillers and didn't really need to be there. Also, instead of putting Lizzie's story intertwined with Darcy's, he should've just made Lizzie's story a sequel or separate book entirely. <br/><br/>I think I would've enjoyed it more if it was a separate book instead of two stories in one."

"Had to read something for class and randomly picked this book. This book was amazing! Honestly shocked me for how fun and intriguing it was, and pleasantly surprised to see LGBT and how modern it felt. I loved the concept, I would've preferred just the story of Izzy but Darcy and Imogen was great to see especially as an artist myself. "

"This is such a beautiful story. It's one of those books that I always forget the name of as I read it when I was in middle school but I'm always reminded of it."