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The Afterlife of Mal Caldera

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Mal's life is over. Her afterlife is only just beginning...

By turns irreverently funny and deeply moving, this debut contemporary fantasy is perfect for fans of They Both Die at the End and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Mal Caldera—former rockstar, retired wild-child and excommunicated black sheep of her Catholic family—is dead. Not that she cares. She only feels bad that her younger sister, Cris, has been left to pick up the pieces Mal left behind. While her fellow ghosts party their afterlives away at an abandoned mansion they call the Haunt, Mal is determined to make contact with Cris from beyond the grave.

She enlists the help of a reluctant local medium, Ren, and together, they concoct a plan to pass on a message to Cris. But the more time they spend together, the more they begin to wonder what might have been if they'd met before Mal died.

Mal knows it's wrong to hold on so tightly to her old life. Bad things happen to ghosts who interfere with the living, and Mal can't help wondering if she's hurting the people she loves by hanging around, haunting their lives. But Mal has always been selfish, and letting go might just be the hardest thing she's ever had to do.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 22, 2024
      The recently deceased Mal Caldera narrates her post-mortem journey of grief and reconnection in Perez’s uneven debut paranormal romantic fantasy. Mal, a drummer for the hit band Goodbye Courage who battled despair and alcoholism in life, repeatedly rejects the hard-partying lifestyle favored by most ghosts she meets, refusing to join either their bands or their all-night dance parties. Instead, she asks Ren Takahashi, a human medium who can see and communicate with ghosts, to contact Cris, Mal’s struggling sister, with reassurance that Mal did not kill herself (though, because she does not actually remember her own death, she can’t say this for sure). When Ren fails, an aimless Mal juggles her time between checking in on Cris and exploring her developing relationship with Ren, though her fellow ghosts warn her that her choice to focus on the living means risking “going geist” and trapping herself enterally in existential pain. The tone is quirky and often humorous and can’t always gracefully accommodate the heavy themes of alcohol abuse, mental illness, death, and suicide. Still, both Mal’s emotional journey of self-acceptance and the romance between her and Ren charm. Readers in the mood for offbeat fantasy should check this out.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      EJ Lavery brings to life or, rather, death this danse macabre of a tale. Chapters are framed by the 10 stages of grief and follow former wild-child rock star Mal Caldera as she processes her afterlife and what got her there. Even though it's safer for everyone if she stays among the thriving ghost community, she can't help trying to reach out to her sister, Cris, or getting a little too close to medium Ren Takahashi. Lavery gives Mal a somber yet confident voice. She also provides some fun voices for the large cast of ghosts, who include a hippie, a flapper, and a British aristocrat. Lavery's pronunciation of Spanish words is far more accurate than her attempts at the sparse Japanese. S.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

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  • English

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