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    After Life
    After Life
    After Life
    Audiobook10 hours

    After Life

    Written by Rhian Ellis and Nancy Pearl

    Narrated by Shannon McManus

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Naomi Ash was born in New Orleans and raised by her mother, Patsy, a medium who schooled her young daughter in the parlor-trick chicanery of the trade. From Naomi recreating presences with table cloths to providing the voice of the dead by talking through a fan, their act is part theater, part magic, and a little too much playing with the letter of the law. Eventually they must beat a hasty—and forced—retreat from New Orleans, relocating to Train Line, New York.

    A sleepy village founded and inhabited by others with a spiritualist bent, Train Line is populated with card readers, table levitators, and crystal-shop owners. Low-rent “Psychic Faires” are held at the local Holiday Inn, and Patsy’s newest creation, “The Mother Galina Psychic Hour,” is on the local radio station. The town is a curious mix between old school “table rappers” and the New Age, and it is here that Naomi comes of age, learns the trade, and falls in love. But love is not only a many splendored thing—it can be dangerous as well. And for a young woman caught between fraud and truth, between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and between the secrets and lies of her youth, the past and present will come together in a rush of truth and consequence.

    Hailed as “a study of eccentricities, which rises above the merely quirky to address those issues of life, death, memory, and love that preoccupy us all,” After Life is a stunning first novel of extraordinary suspense and evocative imagery.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJun 5, 2012
    ISBN9781469240084
    After Life
    Author

    Rhian Ellis

    Rhian Ellis grew up in Western New York State. She went to Oberlin College and the University of Montana, and she now lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, the writer J. Robert Lennon, their two sons, and many chickens.

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    Reviews for After Life

    3.5/5

    74 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This somewhat unassuming book is like Pandora's box: Once you open it, there's no turning back. Great read!
    • 3/5
      This is a mystery with a twist. We know from the beginning who died and who is responsible for that death. What we don't know is why it happened. As interesting as the psychological exploration is, the real peculiarity lies in trying to keep a secret in a town filled with mediums. What irony. This town is called Train Line, but think Lily Dale, a spiritualist community in New York, as the model for the setting.Naomi Ash is an odd character...overweight, unkept, unmotivated - the sort of girl who would read her boyfriend's private journal. Yet she had a sweet, wistful side that at times overshadowed her self-destructive behavior. We never really find out what makes Naomi "tick," but I was fascinated by this truly unique individual who is haunted by her actions. I probably would have liked this book better if I had any confidence in spiritual mediums. I will remain skeptical until I have a visit with someone from the Afterlife.
    • 4/5
      I could not put this down once I started reading. It had me rooting for the main character and hoping no one would discover her crime. I also found the spiritualism aspect fascinating.
    • 3/5
      Slow with an Unlikable Heroine

      AFTER LIFE is the hardest book for me to rate since I've begun reading and reviewing books on Amazon KIndle.
      Brian Ellis is a sumptuous writer: her descriptions are luscious and full and evocative; her analogies stunning. But there is much more to novel_-making than gorgeous writing, and that's called story, and to a lesser extent, character. There really is no story here. Ellis starts us off with a bang, then leaves us hanging for most of the rest of the book- dying of boredom amidst her beautiful prose.
      And what about character? No one really to root much for here- not even the dead guy. The mother- daughter relationship, to me, simply never develops. And as for Naomi...oh, my. Perhaps a spoiler alert, but some of her actions toward Peter, the boyfriend she accidentally- yes, it was an accident, kills are horrendous- arguably far worse than the so-called called crime itself as that was, in fact as stated, an accident in the middle of a fight. Naomi messes with the guys head; and then her actions afterward- the cover-up are truly inexcusable. And inexplicable. She has no arc. And why, in God's name does not ONE of all these psychics pick up on this in TEN years! Are they all protecting her? All fakes? Ellis can't seem to make up her line-up especially about the Mom, which leaves the whole book wobbly.
      But there is that writing!
      For that reason alone, I will certainly search out this author for other work.
      Her writing is something you can feast on. I hope she developed her storytelling after this one.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this debut novel. Ellis has written an interesting, first-person narrative with an almost indefinable aura to it. Naomi Ash a medium, in a town full of mediums plying their questionable trade. But Naomi has a secret: She killed a man, and now, ten years later, the chickens are coming home to roost. The above summary - whilst accurate - really gives a false impression of After Life. It's not a whodunnit (though there is mystery), it's not a thriller (though there is tension), and it's certainly not a supernatural novel (though there are spooky elements). I suppose if I had to pigeonhole it in a genre, it would be a sort of coming-of-age novel - even though Naomi is over thirty. Really it's a novel about relationships, especially mother and daughter relationships, and the for-all-its-psychics-sleepy town of Train Line. Ellis captures Naomi's voice perfectly. Her character really leaps off the page. Indeed, characterisation in general is very good in this book; every denizen of Train Line is fleshed out, and there's a sense that they are all leading their own lives that the novel just brushes against.Train Line itself (based on the real 'psychic village' of Lily Dale) is another character, and it's a great, kind of John Irving-esque location, filled with eccentrics and hugging the lake. The book has a solid structure, and I felt it really delivered on all its promises. Best debut I've read for a while.
    • 3/5
      This is a relatively quiet book in which Naomi, the daughter of a spiritualist, aspires to follow in the footsteps of her mother. It was, however, the opening line of this book that was the reason I purchased it. This novel opens as follows:"First I had to get his body into the boat".Excuse me? Whose body? How did it get in your control? Where were you taking it? Who are you, anyway?Interestingly, we don't get to know much about the person who became the "body" until the middle of the book. In the first half of this novel Naomi talks about her life and how she learned the art of spiritualism. It's only later (and that was fine with me) that the reader comes to learn why the "body" needed to get into the boat in the first place.
    • 4/5
      This book begins with Naomi disposing of the body of her ex-boyfriend, who she has just murdered. Then we get to learn how and why this happened. The setting is a town in upstate New York inhabited by a group of Mediums of various sorts; it is bustling during the season, but is a sleepy backwater in the winter. Naomi grew up there and has carried on the "trade", which seems to be a combination of actual psychic powers and basic hucksterism. Though I have no sympathy for the occult, I was drawn in to the story a Naomi as she copes with her mother and her life and her dire deed. This is a reissue and is part of a series chosen by Nancy Pearl, Seattle's favorite librarian.
    • 4/5
      I'm not sure where I first heard about AFTER LIFE, but when I saw it at the library, I snatched it up. It's a unique murder mystery in that we know from the first page that the protagonist Naomi Ash has killed her boyfriend Peter, and the mystery is discovering how and why she did it. After his bones are unearthed a decade later, Naomi begins to tell us about it. The story alternates between present day events and Naomi's memories of past events leading up to Peter's death.Naomi is a medium, just like her mother. They moved to a spiritualist colony in Train Line, New York, when she was young. Spiritualism is a religious belief that there is an alternate world where spirits of the dead live and certain people (mediums) can communicate with them. One theme that plays back and forth throughout the book is fake versus real. Naomi herself didn't believe in it as a child as she watched how her mother "fudged" spiritual readings to make it more believable to her clients. Whether her mother was a true medium or not, I don't know, but Naomi seemed like the real deal to me."...and we need each other, the dead and the living. Our lives are meaningless without the afterlife, and well, their lives are meaningless without the...antedeath."Naomi is one of the most lost and lonely heroines I've read. After finishing the book, I'm still not sure how I feel about her. I don't dislike her in spite of what she did. I mostly feel sad for her and for Peter.The story was well written, and I enjoyed the rich descriptions the author used for the sights, smells, and characters."On the lake, I rowed hard, my feet braced somewhat awkwardly on either side of Peter. Mist still hung over the surface, and droplets clung to my eyelashes and hair. The lake had been carved by glaciers; it was long and slender as a crooked finger."It's hard to say what, exactly, AFTER LIFE was about. It was many things. Peter's death. Naomi's life. Her relationship with her eccentric mother. Spiritualism. What's real and what we hope is real.I enjoyed the author's engaging writing style. It felt like I was in the story listening to Naomi tell me about her life, and I was hanging on every word. The plot was slow-paced in spots, because she did go into a lot of detail about everyday events, some of them didn't seem to move the story along, but maybe they would have meaning to another reader.AFTER LIFE was a haunting tale to say the least, one that left me with lots to think about. I'm glad I read it, and I wouldn't hesitate to read more from this author. Recommended!
    • 4/5
      This is a novel that is hard to define in terms of genre. It is suspenseful, but not really a mystery. At the beginning of the novel we know immediately that the narrator has caused someone’s death, but we don’t know the circumstances, and this became one of the central questions that kept me reading. It has elements of family drama, with a conflicted mother-daughter relationship, and it certainly has a somewhat Gothic feel to it. The narrator, Naomi Ash, is the daughter of a medium who takes her, as a child, to a small spiritualist community in rural New York. Naomi’s unusual childhood likely plays into who she becomes—a fairly isolated, somewhat socially awkward young woman. She’s not a reliable narrator, and she’s not exactly endearing as a protagonist, but her story is nonetheless quite compelling. The greatest strength of the novel is the writing itself. The sense of place, the emotions of the characters, the tension of the plot, are conveyed with such gorgeous language that reading it is like savoring a delicious dessert. I think that this author could likely make a pan of dishwater something utterly fascinating through her writing, and that’s likely why I so greatly enjoyed this novel, even when I couldn’t quite feel a connection to the narrator. Normally if I don’t feel a hard and fast connection with the main character that’s a deal-breaker for me, but in this case Naomi’s character, while not always likeable, was well-developed, and the beauty of the writing made this a very worthwhile read.
    • 4/5
      Even though the crux of this novel revolves around a murder, it is not a mystery story. The protagonist tells us with the first sentence that she has killed someone. Instead, she relates to us the aftermath of that violent act.It is ten years after Peter died, when his body is discoverd and all the grief and guilt comes flooding back to Naomi; a lonely woman who has difficulty forming relationships with others. She is over weight and has low self esteem, which is compounded by her rocky relationship with her mother.Naomi is a medium who lives in a town full of mediums. The town of Train Line is based on the real town of Lily Dale. Everyone living there is part of the Spiritualist movement. Her mother is a popular medium who is a total fake. She is only involved in Spiritualism to gain attention. Naomi is actually a true medium, maybe the only one in the whole town. She sees visions and hears voices of the long departed. This becomes a conflict when she sees all the phonies around her and feels she has to explain to non-believers that faking it is part of the process.Naomi loves her mother, but her mother is completely self involved and has never paid enough attention to her. She transfers her feelings of abandonment to Vivian, the little girl she babysits. When Naomi's relationship to the deceased is discovered, Vivian is taken away from her and this precipitates her downward spiral.I couldn't put this book down because I really liked the characher of Naomi. I knew she was a murderer, but I wanted a decent if not happy outcome for her. I also enjoyed the few historical references to Spiritualism that are scattered throughout the book. The author mentions the Fox sisters who started the Spiritual movement and the town of Lily Dale. She also writes about spirit photography and the Victorian obsession with premature burial. I recommend this book to those who have an interest in Spiritualism and likes reading first person narratives.
    • 4/5
      I had to think about the impact of this book before trying to write an adequate review. I think the mark of a good book is one that perplexes, challenges and haunts. All three of those are reactions I have to the authors debut novel.Unlike many mystery books wherein we are introduced to a murder and wonder who did it, After Life begins with a statement by the perpetrator acknowledging her misdeed. The opening line -- "First I had to get his body into the boat" -- sets the tone as throughout the book we learn details of the murder, but it isn't until the end, when the reader learns why it occurred.Naomi Ash by all accounts should not be a like able character, yet in the authors clear, perceptive writing, one cannot help but grow to feel empathy for Naomi.Deftly weaving a tale of spiritualism, while tracing the roots of this movement from its beginnings in the US, we are transported to Train Line, NY. Therein, the reader feels as though they are a part of the every day happenings of a small town, filled with eccentric, mystical folk who are not above using a little fakery to assist people in reaching their loved ones who have passed to the other side.Naomi follows in her mother's footsteps and taps into abilities in the spiritualistic realm. Dabbling with her talents, she is sporadically successful in her endeavors, but as with all things in her life, she lacks a drive, gumption and motivation to take control. She is lazy, rarely bathes and fails to develop social skills. She cares little for her appearance, has no friends and seems incapable of sustaining any depth of feeling.Peter Morton arrives in her life and takes her by surprise. Finding she is capable of love is a unique revelation. Her joy is short term. The book weaves past with present when we learn that ten years ago, she killed Peter and buried his body in the surrounding woods of Train Life.When a contractor unearths the body, she prays that Peter is not one of the spirits that can communicate with her.Slow in pace, this book takes the reader by surprise. The author superbly weaves a story of guilt and redemption, of truth and lies, of black, white and gray.Recommended.