I am an avid reader of fantasy. I consume it in a constant stream, pausing only to pick up another load of books at the library, sometimes dipping into other genres. But fantasy, you might say, is my area of expertise. And one of my favorite subjects, for reasons unknown, is anything involving afterlives or death in general. For this reason, when my mother was given a load of books a friend wanted to get rid of, she gave me Once Dead, Twice Shy.
My parents have a decent grasp of my taste in literature, so I'm willing to read this book at least once, even though I've never heard of it. (It appears to have an entry on this wiki, but I have chosen not to read it because it feels a bit like cheating.) The protagonist is Dead to Begin With, which is always interesting, and the premise—she was killed for a unknown reason by a "dark reaper" and is trying to find out why, while trapped on Earth with no desire to move on—would make a decent story, and there's some stuff about escaping fate in there which may or may not be executed well.
So why bother liveblogging it? Well, it bills itself as YA literature, and I've had some bad experiences with that in the past. It tends to be either excellent or mind-numbingly bad. I'm hoping for the former, but either should be entertaining.
And on that note, let's begin.
Prologue
This prologue is about two paragraphs long, so I doubt there'll be much of importance, but there's always a chance.
Our first-person narrator begins by helpfully pointing out that everyone dies eventually, and that she met her end in a car accident on the night of prom. She claims it was a carefully planned "scything" in the battle between light and dark reapers, on which we'll presumably get more information later. She's stuck on earth due to a mistake and because she stole some sort of amulet from her killer. We get a name, Madison Avery, and are informed that "there's more out there than you can see, hear, or touch. Because I'm seeing it, hearing it, touching it, living it" (pg ix).
Sounds promising, if a little melodramatic. The rest of the book could still go either way. Until next time, folks!
