Everlost (1) (The Skinjacker Trilogy)

My 11-year old daughter loved this series. She couldn't put it down and flew through the books. The plot, from what she tells me, is fairly dark and there is some tragedy throughout but she loved it.

In Everlost, we are treated to a lighthearted and wry glimpse of the after - or should I say inter - life. After their cars collide, killing them, the spirits of teenagers Allie and Nick then collide in the tunnel that leads to 'the light' and are sent off course into the Everlost. The Everlost is described as a place in between life and death, which sounded to me very much like purgatory, although one of the characters explicitly states that it is unique and not like purgatory at all. And here lies my problem with this book. Over and over we are told, not shown, what and how things are. The author doesn't tell us whether it's the beauty or personality or actions of one character that leads another to fall in love with her. We are just told that he is. Of all the characters, only Nick undergoes anything resembling true character development and most of it happens 'off-screen', as it were, while he is trapped in a barrel of pickle brine and we are following Allie's escapades.

There were some clever elements, including the conceit of dueling book excerpts (you'll see what I mean). I enjoyed the Stepford Wife-esque characterization of Mary Hightower and the idea that ghosts must continually move if they do not want to sink to the center of the Earth. Overall, however, the afterlife/purgatory are well covered in young adult fiction and the writing in this book just pales in comparison to the standard set by a Phillip Pullman or a Madeleine L'Engle, or even a Lemony Snicket.

In a very good condition

So, I am aware that this book is old, but it was my assigned Summer reading for this year. I was hoping to get Graceling, but so many people signed up for it that I got pushed onto this novel. I decided to read it now because I'd rather spend my summer reading time reading and reviewing novels that I want to read, not ones assigned to me. Frankly, this was a waste of a read in my opinion and I don't understand why so many people recommended it to me highly, but keep in mind that this review is just my opinions, not the opinions of the general consensus.

The book begins with a car crash caused by a stray piece of scrap metal on the highway. Two occupants from both collision don't make it out alive: Allie and Nick, a boy covered in chocolate while preparing to go to a funeral in his last seconds of life. After a nine-month sleep, almost like an incubation period, they finally wake up in Everlost, a limbo stuck between the real world and whatever is beyond it. Soon, they discover that Everlost isn't exactly what it seems. It's full of kids from all different eras of life, stuck wearing what they were wearing moments before death. Yes, that means that poor old Nick will have chocolate covering his face forever. The eldest kids are of ages 14 or 15 and no adults have ever made it to Everlost because it is believed that adults always know where they are going, so they always make it to the end of the tunnel instead of getting lost and thrown into Everlost like many kids do. In Everlost, an individual cannot stand in a single place for too long or they will sink into the center of the Earth, so if they were to stand still, they must stand only on "dead-patches." These patches are places that people have died or things have gotten knocked down. For example, the Twin Towers are Mary Hightower's queendom and I do love this aspect of the novel. Shusterman is keeping a tragedy alive in our hearts and minds in Everlost.

Shusterman had such potential with this plot, but I felt like he didn't take it anywhere worth reading. There was just so many contradictions and oddities in this book that I had trouble wrapping my head around some things, but I did love the book passages at the end of some chapters that were there to explain specific aspects of Everlost through the words of mother-figure and writer Mary Hightower. They cleared many things up for both the reader and the characters in the novel. I'm going to try to explain my distaste for this book without revealing any spoilers.

First of all, Everlost is sort of considered a Heaven-type place for kids since the kids didn't make it to Heaven and were stuck in the in-between. This was a place for good because they certainly were not in Hell. And this place was supposed to last forever because it was good. However, if it's a "good" place, or the "closest to heaven" that these kids will get, why are there monsters and evil kids? And if it's supposed to last forever, why does the McGill, the most feared monster of all, say that one day the world is just going to blow up and all souls in Everlost will be free to flee around the universe? I hate contradictions within novels!

Another thing that I had a problem with was the novel's lack of detail. It's such a big deal not to fall to the center of the Earth because that means that a kid would presumably be lost forever. However, near the beginning of the novel, there was a moment where Allie was pushed into the ground and it wasn't that descriptive. This is supposed to be such a momentous thing because it's so scary, but it just sort of happened and she just described being sunk to different levels of her body and then she felt like part of the ground. Brief descriptions like that stink and detail at such unique moments like that would be awesome! Same with the skinjacking. Allie's able to skinjack people, but by the way Shusterman described the process, it just happens. She simply leans forward and it just happens. Poof! She suddenly inhabits a living human! It doesn't work that way. It's made out to be such a complicated thing, but the process has so little detail to it that you feel jipped as a reader. It was such a potentially unique aspect of the novel that could have been executed so differently!

What confused me most is one of the main unspoken rules of Everlost. It's basically that the harder you want to remember things, the quicker you forget and the more you want to forget something, the more likely you are to remember it. While I thought that aspect of the plot could go somewhere as well, it just served to cause many contradictions throughout the novel. Barely anyone in Everlost remembers their name unless their surrounded by people to remind them who they are. Only when they move beyond Everlost may they remember their true name, so many people have odd names like Hammerhead or Pinhead because they can't remember their real ones. Yet, near the end of a novel, characters spoke the never-before-mentioned birth names of other characters. How is that possible? It makes no sense with the plot!

My other issue with the novel was some of the characterizations. Mary's supposed to be such an angel, but an angel doesn't lie. Yes, she lied to help out her kids and to keep them in Everlost, but in the process, she lied about a lot of things and hurt a lot of kids by keeping them from reaching their final destination point when they decided that they were ready to move on. She lied, manipulated, and kept things from people thinking that it was better for them, but she never gave them the choice to know what was truly better for them. It was her way or the highway. In her process of being good, she hurt a lot of people, so she's not that good of a person after all. She has good intentions, but they're not right.

Allie also reminded me of a girl who would take no suggestions or listen to anybody. I understand that's typical of a 14 year old so that aspect of her characterization was spot on, but it was incredibly frustrating to like her at times. Nick seemed blinded by an infatuation with Mary that blossomed out of nowhere and the McGill and Vari are two completely different stories. Vari is a 9 year old boy that has been 9 for 146 years and is Miss Mary's most trusted assistant. He is obsessed with power and is incredibly conniving, but Shusterman chalks this up to the usual moodiness that a 9 year old experiences. No, no, that makes no sense at all! A 9 year old is moody, yes, but they're not evil! Moodiness does not translate into evil and weird attempts to maybe somehow have a hand in making someone competing for the affection of a respected individual disappear!

Lastly, there's the McGill. He just doesn't make much sense to me. He literally gets upset and feels hurt if people aren't talking about him and fearing him because he loves being a legend. He likes that people are scared of him and likes being the scariest creature in all of Everlost, so why is he so compassionate to Allie? He claims he's so smart, but he so easily falls into her trap and follows her directions on how to skinjack without any hesitation. He can treat a prisoner kindly, but he cannot treat his highest associate, Pinhead, kindly, even when Pinhead rescued him from the open embarrassment of defeat at a pier on Atlantic City. Not to mention the fact that such a scary creature actually lives his life off of fortune cookies. In Everlost, fortune cookies are all true, but the McGill follows the advice of fortune cookies as if it is his religion. As the book progresses and the McGill continues his weird mood swings, his identity is eventually revealed. Once such a thing happens, he suddenly goes from evil to good. Just because he doesn't have the same exterior doesn't mean he doesn't have the same interior. He did a complete 360 in a matter of seconds. That is so incredibly unrealistic for any human being, not just a character in a book.

Then, of course, there's the romance in the book. If you've been following me for even the shortest period of time, you know I love a good romance, though it is not an essential for me to read a book. In all honesty, I feel as if this book would have been better without Shusterman's attempts at romance. Nick's infatuation with Mary began out of nowhere and Mary was so adamant about not even acknowledging the smallest tidbit of feelings for Nick. Then, after a long journey, when Nick returns, she's suddenly kissing him and claiming that she's in love with him. And at the very end, they're "enemies" because they're fighting for two separate causes, but they're still in love. I just don't get it. It was such an unnecessary romance because it makes no sense and you're not enemies with someone you're in love with!

The list goes on, but I'm going to stop because this review is agonizingly long and I just want to retire this novel to my bookshelf. This novel had a lot of potential, but just wasn't for me. However, I do know plenty of other people that like it. I am giving it 2.5 stars for its originality and its level of uniqueness because it's not a story similar to anything else that I have read, besides the whole limbo aspect between the great beyond and the living world. However, I believe that it's full of plot holes, contradictions, and unecessary plot twists that took a lot of substance away from the novel.

This is the first book in a series, but it can certainly stand alone. Perhaps the series will further detail a lot of the loose end problems that I've had with its prequel, but it's prequel disinterested me so greatly that I do not think I'll be picking up anything written by Neal Shusterman for a while. This is the type of read that you can get through on a rainy day. Not amazing, but something to get you by, though it's not something I'm running to re-read or even look at again anytime soon.

Everlost: A Book Review - By Patrick Hayes

Everlost is a book one of a supernatural trilogy. The book begins introducing two main characters of the story. A boy named Nick and a girl named Allie who are killed in a car crash. As they are travelling to heaven, Nick bumps into Allie, knocking them back to earth. They lose consciousness for nine months, and then wake to find a young boy with them. He can't remember his name, so they agree to call him Leif. Nick and Allie don't realize that they are dead. Allie first finds out when she walks out onto the road, then sinking like in quicksand. A Greyhound bus runs right through her, afterwards she knew she is a ghost.
Allie instinctively wants to get home and convinces Nick and Leif to come with her back to New York. When they arrive, they somehow see the twin towers (This is after 911), and find more ghost children there. This is where they find Mary Hightower, a girl that knows much about this place. She tells them they're in Everlost, a place between the living world and the afterlife. Mary lets the stay in the towers that she converted into an apartment-like home for the children.
After a couple days Allie hears there is a way that you can communicate with the living, so of course, she's all ears. She convinces Nick and Leif to come with them too. They soon arrive at an old pickle factory that had somehow crossed into Everlost and find a young kid named The Haunter. Here, they try to take lessons. The Haunter throws them a rock from the living world and tells them to pick it up. First, Nick tries to pick it up, but fails. The Haunter orders some guards out of nowhere and to his surprise throw Nick into a pickle barrel and nail it up. Then Leif tries, but fails. He also ends up in a pickle barrel. Finally Allie tries and picks it up. She orders him to let his friends go, but he kicks her out of the building. She comes back after getting some help, but someone beat her to it! The door was wide open and all the barrels were gone, except one. The Haunter was trapped inside it. He said the McGill took the others.
Allie soon learns that the McGill is a monster that terrorizes the residents of Everlost. He sails the sea on an old ship that transported sulfur that crossed into Everlost. She soon finds the McGill's ship as it leaves port. She climbs aboard and is caught by the McGill, a repulsive, disgusting monster. He later finds that she can skin-jack, or posses people so he uses her to teach him how. She tries stalling him by leading him through a 12 step program, which she makes up along the way. After a while, the McGill finds out the truth, and locks her up with all the other people and finds Nick and Leif. Nick escapes and runs off to get help from Mary Hightower.
The McGill comes to a place where a prophet told him to go to claim his reward, to become alive again. There he finds Mary and Nick waiting for him. It turns out that the McGill was Mary's brother that had died with her. Mary shows him a picture of him and her, and to surprise, the McGill turns back into human form again. The kids he captured come and chase after him. The McGill after Allie, who just ran off. He almost catches her but Allie skin-jacked a jogger and she loses him. The jogger fights back while she's driving and she loses control of the car and flies out of it, into a lake. When she is about to sink into the Earth, the McGill rescues her. Then she goes with him to help him start a new life to make up for his evil years in Everlost.
Nick on the other hand, manages to send all the children where the need to go (heaven). Mary had wanted to keep the kids in Everlost and when she finds out what he did, she becomes enraged and becomes his foe. The story continues in part two.

From the first line to the last, Everlost is one of those novels that is unlike anything else out there. It's full of imagination, bigger than life characters, a rich and well developped world and boosts a snarky narrator voice. This type of read felt a bit more middle grade to me and thus wasn't my usual read but it was delightful and something I'm really happy I picked it up to read.

Everlost is one of those worlds that will stick in your head. It reminded me of an upside down Neverland. After Allie and Nick die in a car crash and don't "get where they are going" they wind up in Everlost as "Afterlights" or ghosts. They sink in places not in Everlost (aka places people haven't died or places that haven't been lost to the world), they glow, fortune cookies tell you the real furture and there are monsters and legends taller than the Tall Tales Americans are so fond of. Full of fun stories of ships sinking into the ocean from a belch in the sea and hideous monsters that can't harm those it huants so must "chime them" (hang them upside down and go to swing them around and bore them), it is this rich imaginative world that immediately captures the reader. This is only enhanced by little snippets of some of the character's own books with rules and guidelines.

The characters of this novel are no less big than the place they inhabit. Each has their own legend and the way people talk about them is all heresay. We see it first hand in the plot. The McGill is a hideous monster but the more time we spend with him, the more we find out about his motivations and who he might be underneath. Mary Hightower is a benevolent caretaker to her charges or The Sky Witch or Mary Queen of Snots to others of Everlost who have heard of her. It's all about who you talk to. Allie and Nick were both fun leads and I liked that they didn't always stay together but their paths did cross and effect each other.

The narrator's voice in this novel is just perfect. In an all knowing third person, it feels like some off kelter fairytale. Sometimes snarky, sometimes funny and always a step ahead, it was perfect for the story told. I did feel that the story dragged on a bit and some of the descriptions where just a bit over board. Also, this type of story felt young to me and that's not my thing. However, it was a pleasure to read.

I'm not giving this one a higher rating because I feel it's geared towards younger audiences and wasn't really my thing. But if you love middle grade, this is the book to pick up. Would I read the sequel? Yes! Did I rush to get through this one? No. If this was my type of novel, it would get a five. It's so inventive and fresh! So if you like what you've read, please pick this one up! You won't be disappointed.

This story pulled me in. The characters were well done and the premise was likable. The ending and climax really had a mixture of feel-good and a feeling that made you question right and wrong even in supernatural environments like Everlost. I loved the writing style. You get a picture in your head while at the same time it flows evenly so you're not lost or confused with details. I highly recommend this book series!

We needed this book for a class project. Great price, came quick!

I bought it for my daughter for a school project. She loved it

Great what I expected