Afterworlds
After the ache and beauty that is National Novel Writing Month, some writers finally get some sleep.
If you're Darcy Patel, you get your NaNo published.
WARNING: SPOILERS
This blog's only *so* new, but if you've known me for a while, you know I love Scott Westerfeld. I grew up reading the Midnighters trilogy and loved the Leviathan series. I'm always a sucker for magic in the real world or history-based fantasy.
So when I was gifted Afterworlds for Christmas (a signed copy, no less!!!), I looked forward to reading it. During Christmas break, I went in about a hundred pages. Then Winter Quarter began at school, and I didn't pick up the book again until after I was done with Spring Quarter. #classic
Afterworlds revolves around two perspectives: Darcy, an eighteen-year-old who just sold her novel, and Lizzie, a psychopomp who just survived a terrorist attack. One narration covers Darcy's adventures in New York City, where she tries to re-define herself as a writer; the other POV covers Lizzie's ordeals in dealing with terrorists, a Hindu death god, and avenging murders on behalf of ghosts.
With the two alternating perspectives, we're introduced to a large but manageable cast. When you've got a large cast, you get used to these characters if they're introduced one by one, but most of the writers in Darcy's POV often left my mind as soon as they left. Westerfeld does a good job of reminding us who each writer was--the fellow debut authors with their excitement, Kiralee with Bunyip, and Imogen with her rings and love of food. On Lizzie's side of the story, everyone's practically dead, from Yama to his sister Yami to the old man in the patchwork. However, Lizzie's family is a constant source of both support and annoyance--her mom is a gem in the book, but her father's one of those newly-rich assholes.
Favorite Characters include:
- Lizzie's mom, whose homemade cooking ethic stayed in my mind because of the love she has for her daughter
- Imogen, who was an excellent aesthetic with her rings and her adoration for food and her matchbox collection and goodness gracious, I'd follow Imogen to hell and back
Regarding the main characters themselves:
Darcy didn't cling to me as much as she should've. I saw a lot of myself in her, but... her publishing situation just soured my impression of her? It was high-risk to push that novel to an agent. There's so many things that Darcy didn't consider and I understand that she was young, but I'd never send a novel to an agent right before college. She lacks a lot of foresight, Darcy does, which is a good flaw to have as the main character. But it just frustrated me the whole time, because later in the book Darcy blames her youth as the source of all her problems, but she doesn't backtrack to the source of her problem in the first place--sending her novel off. First books aren't perfect, but Darcy was so attached to the idea of YA Heaven that she ignored her problems until there was no more time to push them aside.
As for Lizzie, it was more of my personal issues with romance--it felt *shallow* to me, but I suppose mysterious death gods don't leave much room to delve in further. I'm more of a slow-build and/or pre-established relationship sort of reader, but to each their own. Lizzie's relationship with her mother was something I adored, similar to Darcy's relationship with her sister (Nisha was sooooo GREAT). Her plotline with the bad man was great, but her relationship with Yama was so.... not. I could have used a lot more detail about Yama & Yami's old as hell existence and honestly, being old does shit to people. I wanted more sibling interaction on the fact that Yama was being irresponsible to the people he needed to remember.
I wanted more emphasis on Yama acknowledging what Lizzie did at the end--Lizzie's entire ordeal with the bad man was something I really wanted more thought on. When people kill someone, there's this weight that's attached to having to kill people, and I don't think Lizzie ever really acknowledged it and what it did to her. That's something the second Afterworlds could cover, but until then, it's just fodder for fan-created content.
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As mentioned earlier, I read about a hundred pages before I stopped reading it for months. When there are two different stories going on, it was easier to not get attached at the beginning. While it is a huge book, the narration isn't heavy at all. Every time I sat down, I'd blast through another hundred pages easily. I finished the novel in about six sittings, no problem, and it didn't feel like 600 pages at all, which is kind of nice. It wasn't exhausting in the way I expected it to be. But it was frustrating, seeing Darcy being so ill-equipped to handle money and avoiding her college responsibilities. It gave me a lot of stress I did not need, knowing she could just nonchalantly do things without her parents' permission like that.
But in regards to her being a writer, it felt real. All the deadline procrastination, all the constant fuss over choosing endings, her excitement over reading works from other writers and meeting them--it was all a very lovely slice of YA heaven that I think young writers can really resonate with, myself included.
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Anyways, thanks for reading my review! It's a nice book for young writers, if a little idealistic and reckless at times.
To close, I'll leave you all with one of my favorite quotes, courtesy of Darcy talking to Imogen when discussing necessary edits, page 262:
"Thanks. Not for the penguins, but for being here. You make up for bad writing humiliation that's coursing through my penguins."
Love, Dianne
