What Comes After by Katie Bayerl

✦ BLURB ✦

No one could be more disappointed about Mari’s sudden death than Mari, herself. And if she ever thought about the afterlife, she certainly didn’t think it would be a suburban enclave called Paradise Gate or that the biggest problem to plague her in life would follow her into the great beyond: her recently deceased mother, Faye. But that is exactly who greets her when Mari opens her eyes in the In Between—where the newly dead with no religious affiliation come to work out the unfinished business of their lives so they can ascend to whatever’s next.

Mari realizes quickly Faye is her unfinished business and in order to ascend and join her loving grandparents, she’ll have to make peace with and forgive her dysfunctional mother for being no mother at all But there’s too much to forgive: never holding down a steady job, never having a stable home, Mari having to constantly change schools and in the end, Faye choosing her criminal boyfriend over Mari.

It's a lot to sort through, but Mari tries to keep her eye on the ball—attending classes at the Center like Youga and sending grief scarves sailing in Expressive Arts to move her vibe tracker from an angry unsettled red to an ascend-worthy green—all the while trying to remember how she died and deal with Faye, who, of course, is in danger of being kicked out of Paradise Gate altogether. But then Mari discovers in addition to mother drama, there’s even friend drama and boy drama to be found in the afterlife and none are good for her vibes. Even worse is the suspicion that Paradise Gate isn’t at all what it purports to be...and revolution may be afoot.

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✶ PRE-READING ✶

The blurb made this sound intriguing. I wasn't sure at all what to expect, as I haven't read many books set in the afterlife! Unraveling a conspiracy is something that often features in books I read, though, so I thought this would be interesting.

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✶ POST-READING ✶

As I thought... the conspiracy parts were more familiar to me, although they took a while to kick in. Who would have thought the afterlife would be a really bureaucratic New Age spa? The set up was really clever and well thought out, and I enjoyed the twists. There was, as always, an intriguing bad boy, but it went in a direction I wasn't expecting, which was nice.

It surprised me by... being deeper than I thought it would! There's a lot going on in Mari's background and in her head that make her who she is, and part of the point of the story was that everyone has that much going on all the time. Impressive that the book started out treating people as cliches, then swerved and made them all real people!

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✦ RECOMMENDATIONS ✦

Book Recommendation: Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin features a teen girl in an afterlife that isn't quite what she expected, facing her past and the things that have made her who she is. It takes a more philosophical view than this one, though.

TV or Movie Recommendation: The obvious recommendation is The Good Place, but I'm going to swerve a bit and suggest The Lovely Bones. Not set in an afterlife, but it is about an afterlife, and about dealing with how your life treated you.

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✧ VIBE CHECK ✧

A colour palette: beige, beige, and a flash of something rich and deep in the corner of your eye.

A soundtrack: probably something with whale song.

A season: early spring - still cold but bright with promise.

A mood: confused, bemused, sliding into angry and determined.

A scent: childhood memories.

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★ TAROT CARD PULLED ★

Queen of Swords. Light Seer's Tarot. This Queen has seen some things, and she's developed a cold, logical shell to deal with it. It's not that she doesn't have emotions (see that bowl locked safely away? That's her emotions) it's that she doesn't let them out. She always wants to find the truth of the situation.