I registered this book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14428538

A strange little story about a woman who grows up with mediums and other "spiritual" characters, who live together in a shabby little town. When people want their palms read, their past lives elucidated, to hear from their grandparents, they find someone in Train Line. Naomi grows up with a mother who works as a medium and in her youth she assisted her by pretending to be various dead children in the dark. So she knows much of it is fakery.

It's a bit of a shock when she discovers she has some actual kind of gift in this area.

She then accidentally does something that solidifies her place in the spiritual world but also makes her an outlaw in the earthly world. And she has to get away. ( )

From the arresting opening passage to the bittersweet epilogue, After Life kept me entranced; I had trouble putting this book down. The cast of characters could have been kooky caricatures in less skillful hands, but instead they were real people with ambitions and problems and hygiene issues. The mystery aspect was deftly handled as to keep me riveted, and despite her questionable reliability, I cared deeply for our narrator and what would become of her. I couldn't help make connections to Shirley Jackson's Merricat Blackwood along the way. Jackson fans will find a home here. ( )

Here's a memorable first line: "First I had to get his body into the boat."

The narrator is Naomi Ash, a practicing medium (and library cataloger), who isn't necessarily likable but seriously fascinating. This book is creepy with an element of mystery--though this is not a whodunit but a whydunit.

Note: This is a Nancy Pearl Book Lust Rediscoveries pick, and I received a free copy from an Amazon book event back in Oct 2012. ( )

I could not put this down once I started reading. It had me rooting for the main character and hoping no one would discover her crime. I also found the spiritualism aspect fascinating. ( )

Slow with an Unlikable Heroine

AFTER LIFE is the hardest book for me to rate since I've begun reading and reviewing books on Amazon KIndle.
Brian Ellis is a sumptuous writer: her descriptions are luscious and full and evocative; her analogies stunning. But there is much more to novel_-making than gorgeous writing, and that's called story, and to a lesser extent, character. There really is no story here. Ellis starts us off with a bang, then leaves us hanging for most of the rest of the book- dying of boredom amidst her beautiful prose.
And what about character? No one really to root much for here- not even the dead guy. The mother- daughter relationship, to me, simply never develops. And as for Naomi...oh, my. Perhaps a spoiler alert, but some of her actions toward Peter, the boyfriend she accidentally- yes, it was an accident, kills are horrendous- arguably far worse than the so-called called crime itself as that was, in fact as stated, an accident in the middle of a fight. Naomi messes with the guys head; and then her actions afterward- the cover-up are truly inexcusable. And inexplicable. She has no arc. And why, in God's name does not ONE of all these psychics pick up on this in TEN years! Are they all protecting her? All fakes? Ellis can't seem to make up her line-up especially about the Mom, which leaves the whole book wobbly.
But there is that writing!
For that reason alone, I will certainly search out this author for other work.
Her writing is something you can feast on. I hope she developed her storytelling after this one. ( )