On one hand, there’s the story of Jim’s death. ◊ I think there may have been two separate books in here. All that was missing was an elderly haunted amusement park proprietor. Characters are madly tying up plot points by conveniently explaining everything in detail to each other. ◊ The end is where things got a little Scooby-Doo. Does Bee love Jim or hate him? Does she go back to see the others because she still likes them? Was the vote unanimous or not? Does Kipling know what an annoying little turd he is every time he calls someone “child”? I’ll stop there lest I ruin the plot for you. They were often inconsistent, which made them feel unknowable. ◊ I get that this is YA, but the characters were so melodramatic (the level of angst about writing musicals–egads!). The Not Good: The book fell apart for me in a few ways: Pessl was strategic about showing only as much as we needed to know.
Books with this much plot structure can easily be weighed down by too much extraneous information. ◊ The plot is rather large and sprawling, and while I don’t think it necessarily came together elegantly, I do think the pacing was good. I liked the idea of imagining a slip of time just between death and not-death. She just sets up an absurd situation and runs with it. Pessl doesn’t get bogged down explaining the physics of time travel. ◊ The time travel element was creative and different from other books that featured something similar. (Unfortunately, the boarding school in this book is mostly tangential, but at least it existed.)
◊ It featured a boarding school, and I will read anything set in a boarding school, even a school catalog. The Good: I didn’t love this book, but I did find things to appreciate. Lockhart meets a very special episode of Scooby-Doo My Tagline: Edge of Tomorrow (minus the Tom Cruise smarm) meets We Were Liars by E. Only one of them can leave the Neverworld Wake alive. In order to stop living the same day over and over again, they have to unanimously vote on who lives and who dies.
But a tragic car crash happens on a rainy night, and all five characters end up stuck between life and death. Beatrice Hartley is determined to find out happened to Jim, her first love. A year later, the classmates meet up once again. Elevator Pitch: Five friends at Darrow-Harker School are devastated when their friend Jim ends up dead.
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