Hello, You’re Dead. Please Wait In Line.
Peter Green wakes up in the lobby of Purgatory – with no memory of how he died – wearing only pinstriped pajamas and a white silk tie, surrounded by dead people.
Believe it or not, all of this is perfectly normal, one more newcomer who just had to pick rush hour to die. Ah well, please fill out your forms with blue or black ink (blood is not acceptable) and hand them to the skeleton with the cigarette and 1950’s hairdo.
Even children who’ve shuffled off the mortal coil need to go to school, so Pete is sent to Mrs. Battinsworth’s Academy and Home for Unliving Boys and Girls. In author Angelina Allsop’s first novel, Pete will make new friends, learn new skills, and find out all about his new home of Purgatory, just one of the many destinations in the complex highway between Life and AfterLife.
It’s the perfect start of an exciting adventure for Pete…except for the nagging feeling that his lost memories involve something he really needs to remember before it’s too late…
Purgatory Done Right and Suppressing Annoying and Unwanted Memories for a More Relaxed AfterLife
For anyone who thinks that it would be a little grim to have entire school filled with children who died/were murdered (or were born in AfterLife and who’s parents thought it was worth the expense to send their child to a prestigious place like Mrs. Battingsworth’s…it’s complicated), Allsop has gotten around that problem by having all children arrive in Purgatory without any memory of their life or death. All memories of Life are held in the Department of Registered Deaths until the child becomes an adult and can choose to move on from Purgatory to some other world in AfterLife (or surrender their memories for good and stay. Or elect to be reincarnated to Life…again, complicated). Without having to deal with the constant panic that would come from wondering if your loved ones are okay, children like Pete are free to enjoy the world around them.
And oh what a wonderfully strange world it is.
His classes were familiar and unusual at the same time. Mathematics for Unliving Souls, History of AfterLife, Personal Finance 1/Banking Systems, Introduction to Technology, Introduction to Death and Afterlife. Wood Shop.
Employees of the Academy can be humans born in Life or AfterLife, or they can be things like vampires, werewolves, demons, or whatever the heck Mrs. Warshaw the janitor is. (Fortunately she’s not allowed to eat the students. Anymore.) Shadows in the building can move, your clothes can morph back into the ones you were wearing when you died if you forget to focus, there’s a mirror maze that keeps dropping students back in the hallway where they started, and the regular full-moon curse can do annoying things like making the teacher’s chalk float around the room before breaking in half and pinching people.
The city of Purgatory itself is even more interesting, and the children have all sorts of opportunities to visit the stores selling assassins kits, or attend a job fair with stalls run by bizarre creatures (like the seven-foot boar talking about the possibilities of black-market goat hunting.)
Allsop’s prose is easy for younger readers without being overly childlike, and she’s at her best when she has the characters react very matter-of-factly to the most bizarre situations. Some of the newly dead complain about long lines and how other towns don’t combine a busy Portal with the DRD, what a mess. Children at the Academy shrug off the unfairness of getting detention for being attacked by the substitute. Fairies are etherial and decorative but also annoying pests (they bite), the lunch ladies are not to be let outside school grounds (they also bite), and I loved loved loved the scene with the annoying customer at the coffee shop.
Contrary to a lot of boy-arrives-at-the-boarding-school stories, Pete makes friends almost immediately. He’s soon able to study for tests or attend the insanely, beautifully strange Halloween festival with action-girl Scoot, obsessed with fashion and eternally charming Charlie, Alex the sweet and elegant rich girl who Pete is completely incapable of talking to, and many more refreshingly accepting schoolmates (and one annoying bully), all of them completely different and all of them willing to pitch in to help when Pete has to, say, break into a highly-guarded records center to try to recover his memories.
“Word is that her snake form is gold-colored like her hair, and she has green eyes.”
“Disregarding how you found that information, Charlie, please tell us how that helps us.?” Scoot said, exasperated. “We don’t need to pick her out of a lineup of snakes. If we see a giant snake in the hallway, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s the new teacher.”
Charlie looked affronted. “I wasn’t done.” He pouted. “She’s also twenty feet long.”
“Twenty?” Max squeaked. “Lead with that next time.”
Sometimes the magic powers that Pete and his team use aren’t completely well explained, so it can feel like the way they work depends on what’s convenient to the plot (I did like the description of the different types of shadows, and what it feels like to walk through them). The pacing of the story is also a little off sometimes (the first half of the book takes place over the course of just one month, which doesn’t really seem like enough time), and I could have done with a lot more explanation about why Purgatory is set up the way it is, and why there are so many different monsters and mythological creatures in addition to humans.
Younger readers probably won’t even notice these minor quibbles though, and there are plenty of “teaching moments” woven through that work really well: Study and hard work will help you get ahead. Politeness and courtesy will go a long way with most grownups. A group of wildly different friends with no one being shunned for being “weird” means everyone has a different strength and can be helpful in a different way. The future is a wealth of opportunity…
…and there are consequences for breaking the rules.
If this sounds like a fun book, you can find it at Amazon, and you can learn all about the publisher here.