Sixteen-year-old Mari finds herself in the In Between, where the newly dead work out unfinished business before ascending to what’s next, and realizes she must forgive her dysfunctional mother while discovering there’s also friend and boy drama in the afterlife. Simultaneous eBook. - (B & T Entertainment)
"Cynical, sixteen-year-old Mari has only ninety days to remember how she died and to finally make peace with her mother or risk spending eternity adrift in a vast nothingness"-- - (Baker & Taylor)
Sixteen-year-old Mari Novak is dead—and her problems don’t end there. For Fans of The Good Place.
Mari never gave much thought to the afterlife before her untimely demise, but she certainly didn’t think it would be an experimental wellness enclave called Paradise Gate—a place where the newly dead go to sort out the unfinished business of their lives. She also didn’t think the biggest problem to plague her in life would follow her into the great beyond: her also recently deceased mother, Faye. Mari quickly realizes Faye is her unfinished business, and in order to move on to whatever’s next, she’ll have to find a way to forgive her dysfunctional mother for being no mother at all. But there’s so much to forgive: never holding down a steady job, never having a stable home, and abandoning Mari in the end.
It’s a lot to sort through, but faced with the possibility of being turned out into the abyss, Mari gets to work. She enrolls in the prescribed self- actualization classes (think: journaling, positive self-talk, and lots of Youga™). It all seems pretty hokey, but still, the assignments force Mari to confront difficult truths about her past.
When a shocking revelation about Mari’s death captures the attention of the afterlife media, Mari is suddenly in the spotlight, her messy history being judged by the whole realm. She finds escape in an equally troubled boy, who takes Mari to an obscure part of Paradise Gate and introduces her to rebels who show Mari that this “wellness center” is not all it pretends to be. With classmates disappearing and an afterlife revolution brewing, Mari must decide whether to play it safe or break the rules. At stake? Her eternal fate. Literally. - (Penguin Putnam)
AFTER
I died on a Saturday in early October, four weeks before my seventeenth birthday, thirteen minutes after I was scheduled to begin the SATs.
Cause of death: trauma to the head.
Further details: unknown.
I’ve been told that some memory loss is normal. I’ve also been told that, contrary to what I’d always understood (perhaps even hoped), death does not equal The End.
The last thing I remember clearly was sitting in my guidance counselor’s office—a full sixteen hours before I bit the dust, according to the sequence of events I’ve been given. I can still see the soft twist of Ms. Crawford’s mouth as she told me there was nothing more she could do. I remember, too, the sinking sense that despite months of valiant effort, I’d hit a dead end. (No pun intended.) As I left the guidance suite and traced my way through Brookline High School’s empty hallways to its inner courtyard’s crush and clamor, I felt more alone than I’d ever been. More helpless. For once, I saw no path out.
I didn’t kill myself, if that’s what you’re thinking. They’ve assured me my wounds—most notably, a massive blow to the back of the head—weren’t self-inflicted. It was most likely an accident. Possibly, an attack.
The rest—the how, the why now, the why me of it—is a bit of a black hole.
I do recall one bit, though. I’m not sure what you’d call it. A memory? Feeling? There’s no sense of time or location. Just a rush of adrenaline, the itch of a shout. Then, a stampede of emotions. First, shock. Then, terror. Now, disappointment, confusion, rage, regret. And finally, joy.
Yup. The last one surprised me too. I thought dying was supposed to be the saddest thing imaginable, but in my final moment—if that’s what this was—I felt all my burdens lift, and for a tiny sliver of a second, I was the happiest human alive.
Or, you know, dead. As it were.
The feeling was extremely fleeting. I opened my eyes and discovered: A ceiling. Spotless, white. Not regulation hospital tile, but far from heavenly. The mattress I lay on was decidedly thin. I blinked a bit, trying to make sense of it. Where was I?
Then, I saw her.
My mother looked like she did the last time I’d seen her, six months ago, April, but makeup-less and more subdued. Her blue eyes widened, setting off an unpleasant stirring in my limbs. (One, two, three, four. Yes, all four still intact.)
“Mari.” Two pale hands reached for me, and the machine beside me let out an unsubtle screech.
Fun fact: Faye Novak, aka “my mother,” kicked the bucket six weeks before me. Walked out in front of a bus, no explanation. I got the news on a swamp-thick morning in late August. My aunt Jenny delivered her ashes a few days later, then sat on the tiny sofa in my one-room apartment, waiting politely for me to cry. She was too late for that. I took the box, tucked it in a dark corner below the sink, offered to make us some coffee.
My mother was gone. Life carried on. For a while anyway.
Except now here she was, my dead mother, sitting on a simple chair pulled tight against my bed, machines bleeping all around, those baby-doll eyes brimming with regret. I felt a sudden, urgent need to flee.
At this point I became aware of the others. Their cries rose from the beds around us, some squeaky, confused, others low with anguish. Faye, meanwhile, just sat there, staring at me, expecting me to do something, say something. When her heart-shaped lips began to quiver, I understood: I might be dead, but my troubles weren’t over, not even close.
“Where the hell are we?” I finally found the courage to ask. “Is this . . . ?”
“No.” She shook her head.
She quickly brought me up to speed on a few details about death that had surprised her too. “Death isn’t the end of things like we thought, baby. It’s not exactly upstairs-downstairs, either, like other folks believed. Or maybe it is for them.” The majority of souls have gone elsewhere, she explained, or perhaps to multiple elsewheres, sorted according to their deeds and beliefs, leaving the rest of us—the nonbelievers and agnostics, the spiritually muddled and decisively secular, plus all those who (like me) never once took seriously the concept of an after—in this in-between place. For us, this next phase is where the real work begins.
“It’s our last chance to get things right,” Faye said, “here, in Paradise Gate.”
Booklist Reviews
After dying in a shooting on public transit, 16-year-old Mari finds herself in an afterlife space created for atheists, Paradise Gate. Bayerl (A Psalm for Lost Girls, 2017) drops Mari into immediate awkwardness as Mari finds herself confronted with her also recently deceased mother, who left more than a little to be desired while alive. But the structure of Paradise Gate brings plenty of questions to cynical and skeptical Mari, and as she processes her tragic time on Earth, she must also get to the bottom of the motives and intentions of the Powers That Be. Mari's complicated relationship with her mother and a yearning for her also-deceased grandparents add emotional layers to a story that otherwise leans into absurdity and exaggeration for laughs. Both humorous and thought-provoking in a nonlinear narrative that occasionally inserts articles, social media posts, and other world-building asides, this work positions itself as the teen version of The Good Place with a touch of Black Mirror while asking questions about the conscience, forgiveness, and what happens after we die. Grades 9-11. Copyright 2025 Booklist Reviews.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Sixteen-year-old Mari Novak is dead. She's not sure how that happened, but to her horror, her estranged mother—who died six weeks ago—is beside her as she regains awareness. They and countless others linger in Paradise Gate, a place for religiously unaffiliated souls to work through intense 90-day self-help regimens so that they may ascend to the Ever After. Mari has long been the adult in her relationship with her erratic mother, and the embittered teen yet again becomes caretaker, attending ridiculous Youga classes ("I'm sure real yogis would be horrified by this") and therapy sessions to accumulate points toward redemption. When the circumstances of Mari's death are made public, bizarrely casting her as a hero, she becomes an unwilling "true soul model" to inspire others; her desperate search for answers about her death and the truths of this so-called paradise take her into the realm's rebellious underbelly. This innovative and existential novel by Bayerl (A Psalm for Lost Girls)—reminiscent of The Good Place—offers raw, realistic insights into Mari and her mother's troubled relationship. Mari and her mother are white. Ages 12–up. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary. (Apr.)
Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly.
