Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

You know that meme that talks about feeling like you’re in your 20s until you’re AROUND people in their 20s–and then, well, just NO?  That’s how I feel nowadays when I read contemporary YA.  I used to be a lot closer to the target audience, but that was a few children ago, and when I do pick up a YA title, I’m often left with an awareness of my own lack of the Y part, so to speak.  On the other hand, it’s hardly the book’s fault that I sometimes forget I’m almost 40, right?  In one of those moments of forgetfulness, I entered to win a copy of Judy Sheehan’s I Woke Up Dead at the Mall, and while it sat on my shelf for a while (because doesn’t everything?), its number finally came up.

To begin with, I think we can all agree that the idea of murdered New York teens starting their afterlives at the Mall of America is a bit of a bizarre premise.  (Can’t we?!)  That bizarreness is what attracted me to the book in the first place, however, and I have to say, it didn’t disappoint.  Bizarre the book might be, but it’s bizarre in an awfully entertaining way.  The different teens are sharply individual, and while the romance aspect developed quickly but intensely, I imagine I would have been perfectly happy with it if I were actually a YA.  The mystery is not hard to figure out, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be; it’s really just the basis for Sarah’s chosen mission in her afterlife, and the execution of that mission is a good portion of the heart of the book.  The figure(s) in charge of the afterlife were most definitely the bizarre-est (I’m declaring that a word) part of the entire story, as well as my least favorite, but I don’t know that it would have bothered me so much 15-20 years ago.  With the loss of the Y comes a heightened awareness of mortality–yours and that of those you love–which gives death and the afterlife a reality it often doesn’t have when you’re younger.  That reality gives me less patience for books that stretch so very far from my own beliefs about what happens when you die–it’s just too serious a thing to me now–but again, not the book’s fault.  (There’s still an irreverent quality that might have annoyed me even as a YA, but you get what you get when you sign on for this sort of a ride.)

Overall, then, I’d say that I Woke Up Dead at the Mall is a quirky, entertaining, highly original YA novel.  YAs, take note!  I’ll just take my pills and drag my aching bones off to bed now…