Image: The cover of the book is a mustard yellow background with an abstract line painting of a tree. The trunk and branches of the tree are black and also form the profile of a human face halfway up the cover. The leaves of the tree are thick, short paint strokes of green, light blue, and dull red that sparsely cover most of the cover. The top of the book says, "author of the international best seller in the time of butterflies" in white. Below that in large, white, capital letters is the author's name- Julia Alvarez. Along the bottom in large white letters is the title. Below that in small white script it says, "a novel." Below that is a reviewer quote that is too small to make out.
Afterlife is author Julia Alvarez's first adult novel in 15 years and is also the first book I have read by the author. I won this book via goodreads giveaways and had entered because the story seemed like something I would like and would tackle themes that are exceedingly important in the world we are currently living in. Unfortunately, to get right to the point, the book was just not very good. I had to force myself to finish it.
The writing style does remind me somewhat of an author who tries to switch from writing young adult style novels to regular adult literature. I am not sure if that is what the blurb meant by it being her first adult novel in 15 years. But, there are plenty of authors who succeed in this realm and Alvarez didn't deliver. The whole book is very flat and lifeless. I felt like I did not really get to know the characters nor the atmospheres around them well at all. The prose felt very shallow and forced. It does hit on themes of immigration, citizenship, police misconduct, loss, and mental health but in very shallow, often tokenizing ways. The representation of mental health and bipolar disorder in the book is particularly exploitative. The character struggling through a mental health crisis is portrayed as a villain purposely screwing up the lives of her sisters. Some of the things she does aren't even bad or things I would necessarily consider requiring treatment. They definitely punish any weirdness or eccentricity and the way it is written seems to suggest that this is completely fine. The way her story ends, I will avoid spoilers, is written in this same exploitative way of a person's struggle used as a plot point to help the other characters move forward rather than as a journey for the disabled character herself.
Another issue with this book is the organization and style of it. It is written in the style where no quotations (or paragraph breaks or much punctuation at all) are used when people are speaking. I have read some books where authors are able to master this quite well and it works out. It did not work out in this book. I was constantly asking myself: Who said that? Was that someone talking or was that someone thinking? Was that part of the story or a quote? Then there are other sections where she randomly uses quotation marks. Why? If the story was going to have this much dialogue, why did the author nor the editor push for more punctuation or a different style?
The organization of the book is also all over the place. Once again, I have read many books that have this whole stream of consciousness way of writing and it can be done well. But this one just jumped all over the place and rushed from thing to thing. It seemed almost like a first draft of something. The book is 256 pages, but they are small pages with large lettering. So, at least it was short. I finished it because it interested me enough to know what was going to happen. In the end, I wish I would have put it down and picked up another book. Perhaps this author was just out of practice. It looks like she has written some really great novels. This was not one of them unfortunately.
This was also posted to my goodreads.
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