Top 10 Tuesday: From Beyond the Grave
In the end, life inevitably always ends in death. Death and taxes you know. A lot of teens can avoid the taxes part, but they often get to the death part too early, especially in teen fiction. But death is a funny thing, and you don’t always stay dead. Or you hang out in limbo while you wait to learn life’s GREAT LESSONS. So here, for your reading pleasure, is a list of books that tell their stories from beyond the grave, where teens come back to make things right, fall in love, or just haunt the people who made their lives miserable. They are not always ghost stories, because you don’t have to be a ghost to haunt someone.
“Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there’s a tomorrow. Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it.
But for some of us there’s only today. And the truth is, you never really know.” (Lauren Oliver)
The idea for this Top 10 list came as I was reading Before I Fall the other day. Here, Samantha Kingston dies in a car accident on her way home from a party, and yet she keeps waking up to repeat this day over and over again. The question she must ask herself is why: What happened on this day that she is supposed to change? Before I Fall is an interesting book because in the beginning, our main character is really not that likeable. And yet, as she relives this day over and over again she comes to understand who she is and tries to find a way to make it right while she still has a chance. It is an interesting story about bullying and how we affect those around us. (3.5 out of 5 stars)
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Filed under: 13 Reasons Why, Alice Sebold, Before I Fall, Death, Gail Giles, Gayle Forman, Ghosts, Jay Asher, Jess Rothenberg, Laura Whitcomb, Lauren Oliver, Paula Morris, Stacey Kade, The Lovely Bones, Top 10s
About Karen Jensen, MLS
Karen Jensen has been a Teen Services Librarian for almost 30 years. She created TLT in 2011 and is the co-editor of The Whole Library Handbook: Teen Services with Heather Booth (ALA Editions, 2014).
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Anonymous says
What about The Book Thief? It's narrarated by Death, himself.