Grim

Gr 9 Up—On her way home from work one night, hardworking mom Erika Stripling meets a man in a convenience store and shortly afterward, she dies in a car crash. She wakens to find herself in a strange and threatening otherworld, accompanied by Jeremiah, the man from the store. He claims to want to help her, but she is unsure of his motives and desperate to see her children. As Erika becomes embroiled in Jeremiah's power struggles with the hierarchy of the otherworld (he is the illegitimate son of the king and is being threatened by his legitimate siblings), her three children-rebellious Rebecca and responsible Shawn, both teens, and 8-year-old Megan-struggle to come to terms with their mother's death. Soon, they, too, find themselves in land between life and death, pursued by ghosts and supernatural hounds, but also aided by mysterious figures West and Baba Laza, as they try to find their way to their mother. Using descriptive and evocative language, Waggener constructs a complicated mythology that includes elements of Christian theology, Greek myth, and folktales. The vision she constructs is darker and more pessimistic than depictions in comparable YA titles about life after death, such as Gabrielle Zevin's Elsewhere (Farrar, 2005). Much like Erika and her children, some readers might find themselves confused by the complexities of the gradually unfolding plot and mythos.—Kathleen E. Gruver, Burlington County Library, Westampton, NJ