Book #35 of 2015:
Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld
I really love this novel, which is the first thing I’ve ever read from author Scott Westerfeld. It utilizes a cool narrative structure with two parallel stories told in alternating chapters, each of which has a pretty awesome female protagonist. One is a first-time Young Adult novelist, just out of high school and nervous about editing her manuscript and establishing a new life for herself in NYC; the other is the heroine in her finished novel, a teen girl who escapes a terrorist attack by temporarily willing herself into the afterlife.
The novelist character is a demisexual woman of color with a lesbian love interest, and over the course of her edits and her blossoming romance she struggles with issues of cultural appropriation and impostor syndrome and what constitutes someone’s real name. The book-within-a-book has some really neat developments that clearly reflect the stuff the writer character is going through, and the subtle differences between those finished chapters and the drafts we see in the others are quietly illuminating as well. I would have liked either story just fine on its own, but in linking them together this way, Westerfeld has crafted something really special.
★★★★★
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