I don't usually fall for stories that remake Greek and Roman myths in a modern light. It's been done so many times. However, this book does it so well that I don't care.
Let's start with Death. His dry humor and personality endeared me right away. And his internal response to a chatty librarian in the afterlife was perfect: "He was justifiably cross at the prospect of being greeted as though he were a guest in a cafe rather than the King of Terrors himself." And when the woman asks him for ID and he pulls his iconic scythe from thin air.
I love how the author portrays the complexities of human emotion. Especially around 52% where two characters are processing their grief about a friend's coma.
As for the writing quality... have you ever read books on how to improve your writing? Remember how they like to give examples of what good writing looks like? You could flop this novel open to any random page and find worthy candidates.
Some parts I found memorable:
-"It wasn't like he opened his bathroom door in the morning to find Beetlejuice sudsing up in his shower" (this one made me do a spit-take)
-"...and not at all because the idea of Andy in a war zone made her feel like she'd swallowed a hand grenade."
-"...as though he'd done it out of spite and not because he'd spent the night doing CPR on a guy whose organs sloshed in his chest cavity with every compression."
-"A cloud so ... white and fluffy it could have come out of a Care Bears cartoon."
-"Each step they took sent a puff of dust up from the arid ground, so they ended up walking in a sad little dust cloud, like Pigpen from the Charlie Brown cartoons."
-There's a scene where a young guy scolds his dad for letting a woman (a single, self-sufficient mother) cook him dinner while her son is in the hospital. I love the dad's response: "If making me dinner soothes her pride enough to allow me to buy her groceries and make sure her car gets serviced, well it seems like an even trade to me." And I love this follow up observation about the dad, named Hector: "Andy blinked rapidly while the world reordered itself into a new shape around Hector as a steady man with a good heart."
This is one of those rare books I'll be going back to read again someday. Try it for yourself and you'll see what I mean. The imagination poured into this work is a drink offering I'm sure any pantheon would gladly accept.
There are now three things that are certain in life:
-death
-taxes
-this author's other work floating over from the afterlife onto my kindle in the foreseeable future
