Afterworlds - Scott Westerfeld

Title: Afterworlds
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Genre: YA
Rating: 2.5/5
# pages: 599
Date read: October, 2016

Darcy Patel has put college on hold to publish her teen novel, Afterworlds. With a contract in hand, she arrives in New York City with no apartment, no friends, and all the wrong clothes. But lucky for Darcy, she's taken under the wings of other seasoned and fledgling writers who help her navigate the city and the world of writing and publishing. Over the course of a year, Darcy finishes her book, faces critique, and falls in love.

Woven into Darcy's personal story is her novel, Afterworlds, a suspenseful thriller about a teen who slips into the "Afterworld" to survive a terrorist attack. The Afterworld is a place between the living and the dead, and where many unsolved - and terrifying - stories need to be reconciled. Like Darcy, Lizzie too falls in love... until a new threat resurfaces, and her special gifts may not be enough to protect those she cares about most.


"Afterworlds" is really two stories mixed together. Every odd chapter tells the story of Darcy Patel, her life in NYC and her experiences as a debutante author, and every even chapter is the book Darcy wrote.

I'm finding it extremely difficult to figure out what I think of this book and how to rate it. I enjoyed the chapters about Darcy - appreciating this look into the book publishing business and the life of an aspiring author, not to mention that I really liked Darcy, despite her tendency to turn into an emo teen. She's 18 - she's allowed to. Those chapters flew by and were a breeze to read. That part of the book probably deserved 4 stars.

However, the chapters about Lizzie were such a slog to get through! I LOVED the first one (and as that was the chapter I read as part of the sample, which made me buy the book, I feel kinda cheated), but once she went back to the flipside after that first time, I was done. That entire storyline just didn't work for me. I don't know if it's just that I'm really not into ghosts, or if I'd have disliked it regardless, but those chapters were a real chore to read. That part of the book would probably have been a dnf if it had stood on its own.

In the end the good outweighed the bad, and I finished the book - but it was a huge disappointment, and I'm disinclined to recommend it to anybody else.