Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin Random House, 2025
Now Available!
In this darkly funny comedy to rival The Good Place, sixteen-year-old Mari is dead, but her problems don’t end there. Turns out, the afterlife is less a heaven or hell situation and more a wellness retreat: Paradise Gate, where the newly dead go to work out the unfinished business of their lives in hopes of moving on to whatever’s next.
Mari’s unfinished business is clear: to untangle the fraught and painful relationship with her recently deceased mother, who Mari is horrified to discover will be her roommate at Paradise Gate. If the Powers That Be expect Mari to forgive neglectful, self-centered Faye, she’s not sure it’s possible; there’s so much to forgive.
But faced with the possibility of being turned out into the eternal abyss if she doesn’t play along, Mari gets right to work. She enrolls in all the prescribed self-actualization classes (think journaling, mantras, positive self-talk, sailing healing scarves into the air, and lots of Youga). It all seems pretty hokey, but the assignments force Mari to confront the difficult truths of her past.
And when she needs a break from things that feel difficult, there’s Jethro, a troubled boy whose lips become a refuge. But when classmates start to disappear and Jethro introduces Mari to a band of rebels with a very different take on healing, Mari finds herself with an afterlife mystery to solve. Is something sinister happening at Paradise Gate? Who’s telling the truth about the path to redemption? As a revolution brews and upsetting fragments from Mari’s past resurface, a lot hangs in the balance. At stake? Mari’s eternal fate.
At the heart of this laugh-out-loud, speculative skewering of everything from pop psychology to social media is a deeply felt coming-of-age tale of a girl who learns it’s never too late to love the life you live.