Yzabel / February 24, 2016

It’s a Wonderful Death by Sarah J. Schmitt

My rating: [rating=2]

Blurb:

Seventeen-year-old RJ always gets what she wants. So when her soul is accidentally collected by a distracted Grim Reaper, somebody in the afterlife better figure out a way to send her back from the dead or heads will roll. But in her quest for mortality, she becomes a pawn in a power struggle between an overzealous archangel and Death Himself. The tribunal presents her with two options: she can remain in the lobby, where souls wait to be processed, until her original lifeline expires, or she can replay three moments in her life in an effort to make choices that will result in a future deemed worthy of being saved. It sounds like a no-brainer. She’ll take a walk down memory lane. How hard can changing her future be?

But with each changing moment, RJ’s life begins to unravel, until this self-proclaimed queen bee is a social pariah. She begins to wonder if walking among the living is worth it if she has to spend the next sixty years as an outcast. Too quickly, RJ finds herself back in limbo, her time on Earth once again up for debate.

RJ is a snarky, unapologetic, almost unredeemable, very real girl. Her story is funny and moving, and teens will easily connect with her plight. Prepare to meet the Grim Reaper, who’s cuter than you’d expect; Hawaiian shirt–wearing Death Himself; Saint Peter (who likes to play Cornhole); and Al, the handler for the three-headed hound that guards the gates of Hell. This cast of characters accompanies RJ through her time in the afterlife and will do their best to gently shove her in the right direction.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.]

Cute in some ways, although I really couldn’t get along with the main character, which is my main gripe with this novel: I get that RJ had to start with room to change in terms of personality and actions, since otherwise there wouldn’t have been such a fuss about whether she should be allowed to go back to living… but she was seriously annoying. What she considered witty and snarky comebacks were ridiculous and whiny, and I definitely won’t fault any of the other characters for calling her a spoiled princess. She came off as a brat, which made it very difficult to root for her and to want to see her unfair circumstances changed.

And they were unfair, so at least one could understand why she felt entitled to try and fight that “oh, I accidentally killed you instead of that other person I was meant to reap… Whoops, too bad, let’s move on, welcome to the afterlife, please get in line.” It’s just that after a while, my reactions were to roll my eyes at yet another iteration of RJ blabbing and putting her foot in her mouth when probably anybody and everybody else would have understood *now* was the time to shut up. Maybe it’s just me who can’t stand such characters. Or maybe she was just, well, more annoying than she was meant to be: befitting her personality, but still not something I’d like to read about for 200 pages. It didn’t help that so many people in the afterlife tended to view her as special, as deserving to see her case appealed—I couldn’t see why so many people would side with her. Her success would set a precedent, yet I can’t believe people in general would root for a self-entitled brat without having second thoughts about it. (Granted, some characters were in it for the power struggle and for cashing in favours: this at least felt logical.)

Fortunately, after RJ goes through her “trials”, she does become a more pleasant person to follow—not really because of her actions, in fact, but because her shark was more toned down and felt more “well-placed” than “bratty”.

Another problem, that I don’t know how to describe exactly: the changes she went through seemed drastic and a bit too much on the unbelievable side for me to buy them (from self-centered bully and special snowflake to nice girl who stands up for her friends and does good deeds). However, I think this has much more to do with RJ’s trials, which I felt were too short and handled too quickly. Basically the focus was much more on the “world of the afterlife”, on secondary characters like Cerberus’ handler, on the angel presiding over the tribunal and the antagonistic relationship between him and Death, and this left little room for RJ actually reliving some important moments of her past and figuring out what she had failed to do the first time. Had those been more in the spotlight, had there been more of such moments (or had these three just been longer, with more conundrums for RJ to tackle), it would’ve made her change more convincing. As they were, they ended up an afterthought, a sort of checkpoint, rather than the turning points the blurb made me expect them to be. The desired outcome was so obvious anyway…

Daniel and Madeline were nice characters, too, with Madeline casting a fresh breeze over them all: knowing she was going to die, and nevertheless choosing to live her life on her own terms, in joy and friendship (sorry, the “I’m terminally ill so I’m entitled to be an asshole” attitude doesn’t sit well with me either).

Overall the plot was sweet, though simplistic, with only a couple of twists that I could see coming, to be honest. Like a nicely wrapped gift box whose contents you’ve already guessed. It won’t be more to me than “it’s nice”. I didn’t like the book, I didn’t dislike it, and it’ll likely end up as one of those reads I’ll forget quickly.