Everlost

Nick Podehl provides a strong narration for this tale of adolescence, life after death, and monsters. He must balance a range of quirky and normal characters without overdoing the eccentricities to the point of losing adult interest in the story. His more colorful character voices prove quite amusing while his narrative voice keeps the story engaging. Instead of passing into the afterlife, Nick and Allie find themselves in a netherworld where only children live. Together, they must find a way to defeat the dreaded McGill and find the answers to their questions about this mysterious and strange world. Well-crafted and unique at times, EVERLOST plays like a pastiche of PETER PAN and other childhood fantasy stories. L.E. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Starred review from November 6, 2006
Shusterman's (Full Tilt
) enigmatic novel imagines a purgatory where only children go, with its own vocabulary and body of literature plus a monster named the McGill. After a car accident, teens Allie and Nick awaken 272 days later in Everlost. "It took nine months to get you born, so doesn't it figure it would take nine months to get you dead?" says the boy who discovers them, a nameless, lonely child they call Lief (an "Afterlight" who is 100 years old). In Everlost only the young exist, because adults "never get lost on the way to the light." The World Trade Center is there, too, home to Mary Hightower, a 15-year-old shaman of sorts and author of countless books (e.g., You're Dead—So Now What?
). Shusterman uses excerpts from Mary's books (with an increasing sense of menace) to segue from one chapter to the next. Allie's flight from Mary's kingdom of "perfect routines," and her attempt to rescue Nick and Lief from a six-year-old spectral gangster lead her into a conflict with the monstrous McGill (with "sharp, three-fingered talons for hands,... its mismatched eyes wandered of its own accord"). Along the way, Allie learns the art of "skinjacking" (inhabiting the living), and Nick discovers a thing or two about the mechanics of Everlost, much to Mary's dismay. Shusterman's landscapes seem both familiar and ghostly, just the right mix for this fascinating limbo land that readers can only hope will provide the setting for more books to come. Ages 12-up.