Hereafter by Tara Hudson

Publisher’s summary: Can there truly be love after death?

Drifting in the dark waters of a mysterious river, the only thing Amelia knows for sure is that she's dead. With no recollection of her past life—or her actual death—she's trapped alone in a nightmarish existence. All of this changes when she tries to rescue a boy, Joshua, from drowning in her river. As a ghost, she can do nothing but will him to live. Yet in an unforgettable moment of connection, she helps him survive.

Amelia and Joshua grow ever closer as they begin to uncover the strange circumstances of her death and the secrets of the dark river that held her captive for so long. But even while they struggle to keep their bond hidden from the living world, a frightening spirit named Eli is doing everything in his power to destroy their newfound happiness and drag Amelia back into the ghost world . . . forever.

Thrilling and evocative, with moments of pure pleasure, Hereafter is a sensation you won't want to miss.

My take: Hereafter was such a refreshing, cute book to read. I was immediately intrigued the moment I picked up the book when I realized that I was reading from the point of view of a girl who is a ghost. Right from the very beginning I wanted to know who she was before she died, what the cause of her death was, why she only knows her first name and why she hasn’t ever tried to figure out her past. She only knows that she has been dead and walking the earth as a ghost for more than a few years, and every so often she falls asleep, has a nightmare about her horrific death, and then wakes in a cemetery.

At first, Amelia’s afterlife seems very boring, but pretty quickly it becomes not so boring when she meets two important characters. One is a human boy (Joshua) who is able to actually see her after he survives a horrific accident that almost takes his life, and the other is another ghost, Eli. Amelia immediately becomes pretty obsessed with Joshua; she is fascinated that a human boy can actually see her. I, myself, was more intrigued by Eli than the other characters in Hereafter, and I wish we saw a lot more of him in this book.

The romance that develops in this book is really sweet but, as you might expect in a ghost story, there are a lot of complications in multiple different directions, which become even more difficult and complicated when a lot of things start to go majorly wrong near the end of the book. But I loved how the story ended and I was determined to see where the story would continue, so I immediately picked up and started reading Arise, the next book in this intriguing series.