Book Review: Afterlife Academy by Jaimie Admans

Title: Afterlife Academy

Author: Jaimie Admans

Genre: YA Paranormal Romance

Age Group: Young Adult

Rating: 4 stars

Purchase: Goodreads, Amazon

Even being dead isn’t enough to get you out of maths class.

Dying wasn’t on sixteen-year-old Riley Richardson’s to-do list. And now, not only is she dead, but she’s stuck in a perpetual high school nightmare. Worse still, she’s stuck there with the geekiest, most annoying boy in the history of the world, ever.

In a school where the geeks are popular and just about everything is wrong, Riley has become an outcast. She begins a desperate quest to get back home, but her once-perfect life starts to unravel into something not nearly as great as she thought it was. And maybe death isn’t really that bad after all…

Welcome to Afterlife Academy, where horns are the norm, the microwave is more intelligent than the teachers, and the pumpkins have a taste for blood.

Afterlife Academy is one of the most original young adult novels I’ve read in a long while. Riley Richardson dies in a tragic accident caused by her boyfriend Wade. She isn’t the only person to die that day though – Anthony, the school’s outcast and the person Wade was trying to harm that day. Riley wakes up in a strange, foreign place near a school that looks like hers but isn’t. This world is devoid for color, save for Riley, but Anthony is completely gray. A prefect shows up urging them to go to the school. But their school has transformed into the Afterlife Academy, a place where students who passed away linger on until they graduate.

Riley and Anthony have a lot to learn in this new, foreign world. For Riley, the school’s most popular girl, the journey is all the more complicated because here, she is the outcast. She misses her family and Wade, convinced he’s consumed by guilt, whereas Anthony is of course, a lot less concerned about Wade’s supposed guilt. Anthony, math genuins and overall geek, adapts nicely into the new school, even finding a group of friends, but for Riley the place brings loneliness and time to reflect upon all the things she did to torment Anthony in the past.

Riley was  bit obnoxious at first, but her behavior suited the story. She went through amazing character development through this book. At first she behaves like a typical brat, and it annoyed me endless that she was more worried about Wade – who KILLED her, by the way, because of the accident – than about losing her parents. She complained about anything, constantly looked for a way out. And not just for herself, no, but to get back to Wade freaking Wade. I don’t get that, but either way, she gradually began to change. She became friends with the demon lady who worked in the school’s cafetaria, she began to treat Anthony better.

I really liked Anthony from the get-go. He’s serious and studious but he can also be fun and entertaining. I thought he and Riley would be a great match – if only she stopped whining about Wade. Wade was the giant idiot in this whole book, who didn’t even show any remorse, and who deserved nothing but bad things.

The best part about Afterlife Academy is the originality and the setting. Jaimie Admans combines an academy for the deceased and interesting lectures like Haunting or on how to be a poltergeist or on how to watch one’s family from the afterlife, with demons and other supernatural events. My hope is that she comes up with a sequel to this book – I would love to read it. This book is a great choice for all fans of YA Paranormal Romance looking for something original.