Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld

Gut Instinct Rating - 3

Story Line - 2

Writing Style - 3.5

Characters - 3.5

Excitement Factor - 2

Believability for type and topics - 4

Similarity to other books - 4.5

Dust Jacket Art - 3

Title Relevance - 4.5

Goodreads users gave this book a 3.72. I think it was more deserving of a 3.31

Emoji Meter: 🤔 👻 🙋

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Published in 2014.

Pages: 599.

Number of books by author: 66 Novels.

Genre: YA Fiction.

This book started out really strong. I was already recommending it out to people... now I have to rescind that recommendation. This book took a nasty turn about half way through when none of it was making sense. Have you seen Inception? You know, the movie where there's a scene within a scene, and then a scene within that scene? Well, this is similar. There's a book within a book. And the book inside the book - it wasn't very good, which makes the actual book not so good. So, when I started to evaluate the book, I had to evaluate both books, because I read two books. (I should get credit for both, too.... I wonder how inception-like books work towards your end of year book count...anyways...) So, Afterworlds 1 (the actual book written by Scott Westerfeld) had really good characters except for the main character was obnoxiously whiny. You could tell she (Darcy) was a teenager who was otherwise spoiled in her only-child-upper-middle-class ways. She really overlapped with the main character, Lizzie, in Afterworlds 2 (the book within the book), but I can't handle two really whiny characters. I'm an only child, and I didn't even cry that much. In general, however, the characters, in both stories, were pretty well done. The Afterworlds 2 characters made far less sense, however. Their backgrounds didn't match up with their actual story lines present day, and maybe that was intentional, I'm not really sure, but even the characters (within the story and external of the story but within the story -confused yet?) questioned the Ra-whoever the God-like character was supposed to be. It just wasn't a well-written secondary story. The believability in Afterworlds 1 was pretty perfect. It was incredibly realistic, but I had some questions about a 17-year old getting published without parental consent because I know I wasn't able to get published without parental consent by a

publishing company when I was 17. Now, maybe it's by company, but it's a legally binding contract and you're not a legal adult, so you cannot legally sign away your rights and future. And that really sets up the entire book, so that caused some riff for me. And, I wasn't real pleased with how things were left between Darcy and her significant other. There was a lot of questions left unanswered, and I don't like books without answers unless there's a designated sequel... and from what I can tell, there isn't... despite the inner-story telling us there is. The Afterworlds 2 was crap and none of it even made sense so none of it was even believable. It could've been, if it made sense, but it didn't make sense, so it couldn't become believable. It was certainly unique. I've not read a book-within-a-book that I can recall. I'm sure I have, but never to this extent. And certainly not this horribly. The writing style was all over the board. And that has a lot to do with the complexity. The author was trying to write cross-gender, for one, and trying to gather the voice of another gender is hard enough, but trying to do it for two authors within one book is difficult enough. By that, I mean, he's trying to gain two distinct voices by two individuals who identify as a different gender than he, and he failed, miserably. They were the exact same voice. (From what I understand, he often writes from the female voice. Interesting tactic.) There was no excitement. This was such a boring book. If I just read one of the stories, both would've been boring. They were equally boring, one because nothing happened, and one because it didn't make any sense. There was no story line in either of them. One, again, nothing happened - a book was almost published, but it was just following someone on the journey of corrections (yayy.... not.) and the other was following someone as they discovered a land, but the land didn't make sense because nothing was vetted, nothing was explained, it was just made up as she went, and it was obvious that was how it was done. The title fit fine, I guess. But it was called the Afterworlds... didn't they spend most of their time in the Underworld? Do what you want, I suppose. And the artwork was whatever. It didn't do anything for me. Overall, just leave it in the $1 bin where I found it. DO NOT PICK THIS BOOK UP. It'll waste 600-pages of your time... and whatever that is equivalent to is not worth it.