A couple of months ago, Genalea Barker reached out to me and asked if I wanted to review the ARC of Life After, her debut YA novel which is set to be published on February 7th, 2023. I have loved every minute of this novel and cannot wait to share the review with you all!
Thanks again, Genalea, for providing me with a review copy!
Life After
Life After tells the story of August, a young woman who is about to leave for university together with her twin brother Benny. This change doesn’t come a bit too soon, because their home has never been the same since their mother left. Desperately needing their new start, the twins focus on their artistic talents in those last couple of months of high school. But then, a tragic accident changes August’s life completely, and all her dreams for the future are crushed instantly. Feeling broken beyond repair, August will have to dig deep in her strength to find a way forward.
A beautiful tale
As usually, I went into this tale rather blind. I knew it was a young adult contemporary story about grief, but I hadn’t reread the blurb before starting. When I was on the first page, I realised this book was going to hurt and be beautiful at the same time. Although my own story is (luckily) quite different from August’s, there were so many elements that were all too similar and which really touched my soul. Thanks to this, I felt an immediate kinship to the twins. If there’s one thing contemporary Young Adult books have taught me, it’s that the raw, deep stories that hurt are also the ones that heal. And that’s exactly the case with this book as well. The story might break your heart, but you can be assured it will also have helped you pick up and glue all the pieces back together before it has ended.
That man is a memory now. The man who laughed, joked, smiled in family pictures—mother, father, daughter, son—doesn’t live in our house anymore. In his place is a pale, rough shell who pretends to be human.
The author’s writing style is beautiful, and the characters and plot line draw the reader in as from the very beginning. As mentioned, I wasn’t aware of the details when starting the book, and I noted down the exact moment when I realised what was going to happen (and my heart nearly stopped). Reading on with a heavy heart, I prepared myself for the inevitable, and when it came to pass, I was really impressed about the way in which the author captured the resulting emotions of all the different characters so perfectly. The story is driven both by character interactions and by internal narration, which is for me the ideal combination for this type of subject.
I may fall apart tomorrow. Or next week. Definitely by next month. It’ll probably be years before I make it a single day without pausing to explore the emptiness [..] left inside me.
In conclusion, this novel is very well written, both from a storytelling point of view as from an emotion evoking one. I cannot wait to read more by this author! Without a doubt, four gemstones out of five:
Age Category: Young adult but suitable for a broad audience
Trigger Warnings (click here, may contain spoilers)
Warnings for child neglect, abandonment, and abuse, grief, PTSD.Do you want to discover more?
If my review inspired you to pick up the book, don’t hesitate to check it out at Goodreads or to pre-order it:
Amazon.nl: eBook edition
The book will be available as of February 7th, 2023!
Similar to this
If you are as smitten with this author’s writing as I am, then I have some good news for you. Genalea has not one, but two books coming up. The first one, A Song I Used to Know will be a New Adult Romance and is set to be published in December 2023. Lovehurts, another Young Adult contemporary tale, will be released in July 2024.
I would also love to recommend Hating Jesse Harmon by Robin Mimna. This was by far my favourite YA contemporary novel of 2022. Plus size and autism representation, romance, an ordinary girl beating all odds: I love it! Check out my review here.
When I subscribed to my very first book box a couple of year ago, I received two YA contemporary standalones that I would also highly recommend to everyone. First, The Opposite of Falling Apart by Micah Good, which is one of the best novels in this genre I have ever read. It’s the tale of two teenagers who are learning to accept that they are different and it has great disability, PTSD, and anxiety representation. My review can be found here.
Secondly, The Art of Losing, by Lizzy Mason. This book tells the tale of a girl who needs to come to terms with the aftermath of an awful night. At a party, Harley discovers her younger sister Audrey hooking up with her boyfriend Mike. Enraged, she leaves them both and goes home. Unfortunately, that leaves Audrey to catch a ride home with Mike, who has drunk way too much and they end up in a serious accident. This book is very well written and the story is really moving. I read this before I reviewed books, so unfortunately, I only have a very short review available at my Goodreads (four gemstones).