A review by alsahm
After Life by Gayle Forman

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

A seventeen-year-old girl rides her bike home one day, only for her family to be shocked to see her - she died seven years ago. The family revisits and rehash their grief, and other characters reflect on how the death affected them.

This book is told from multiple POVs that all eventually link together but you're confused about it the first time around (akin to They Both Die at the End, to which I am more forgiving). The points-of-view are these one-note characters:

• Amber, a Girl Who Died
• Amber's younger sister, a lesbian, and often described as special and weird
• Amber's cheating boyfriend who is Big and fears Crushing her and did we mention he is Big
• Amber's vapid best friend with whom her boyfriend cheated
• Amber's former best friend's mother, a Black lesbian cop
• Amber's father who is Not Religious until he is but maybe not that much
• Amber's high school English teacher who seems to have jumped here out of The Raven Boys and wanders the earth
• Amber's high school senior photographer who also wanders the earth, but more than the teacher

Amber finds out that her parents are near divorce and that her sister never had her 10th birthday party and that her aunt moved to New Zealand forever and feels guilty about causing all of this. She plans to throw her sister a new birthday party and invites all the people that would've been around for the 10th one. Meanwhile, her parents argue about her father suddenly believing in miracles, and decide that they're going to skip town and start new, fake lives overseas so that they can live as a family again.

Neither the characters nor the story of this book stick out much. It mostly falls flat, which would make it mediocre at best, except that...

• the sister being a weird all-knowing lesbian who sees ghosts is annoying (and we don't see how super-church-mom reacts to her coming out which is such shafting of her story?)
• Amber's obsession with her weird cardboard boyfriend and how when she first finds him they immediately start stripping before they've said a word to each other. What was that. 
• her boyfriend thereafter doing nothing but being sad and saying "Amber! :("
• nothing happens

...take it from "boring" to "bad" for my demographic. I can see fans of books like If he had been with me finding it deep.