• About The Book

  IT BEGINS WITH AN ACCIDENT.
  Nick and Allie don’t survive the crash, and now their souls are stuck halfway between life and death in a sort of limbo called Everlost. It’s a magical yet dangerous place, where bands of lost souls run wild and anyone who stands in the same spot too long sinks to the center of the Earth. Frightened and determined, Nick and Allie aren’t ready to rest in peace just yet. They want their lives back, and their search for a way home will take them deep into the uncharted areas of Everlost. But the longer they stay, the more they forget about their pasts. And if all memory of home is lost, they may never escape this strange, terrible world.

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Awards & Honors

2009 ALA Popular Paperback List
2009 Oklahoma Sequoyah Young Adult Award List
2009 Garden State Teen Book Award List
2008 School Library Journal Best Books of the Year,
2008 VOYA – Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers
2008 International Reading Association Young Adult Choice List
2008/2009 Missouri Gateway Award List
2008 New York Public Library “Books for the Teenage.”
2007/2008 Georgia Peach Book Award List
2007 PEN USA Literary Award – Finalist
2007 Children’s Literature Council of Southern California “Fantastic Work of Fiction”

Reviews

From School Library Journal
Starred Review. Grade 8 Up-Nick and Allie are killed in an automobile accident and meet as they are heading down a tunnel toward the light. They land in Everlost, the space between the living and the end of the tunnel, and meet Lief, from whom they learn that Afterlights cannot walk where the living walk and that they cannot be seen or heard by the living. Allie is determined to go home, so she and Nick set out from the accident site in upstate New York and the safety of Lief’s forest for New Jersey. Even though they have been warned about the McGill, a dreaded, evil monster, they slowly make their way, eventually arriving in New York City. There they meet Mary Hightower, who cares for Afterlights in the destroyed World Trade Towers, keeping them safe from the McGill and the Haunter. (In addition to children, buildings and objects can also cross into Everlost if they were much loved.) In their ensuing adventures, they are captured by the McGill and suffer a horrible fate before Nick discovers his true purpose in Everlost. Schusterman has created a world in which nothing is as it seems. As the teens struggle to make sense of this alternate afterlife, they also grow and develop as people. They learn to question those who have put themselves in power, and they begin to see what is truly important. Shusterman has reimagined what happens after death and questions power and the meaning of charity. While all this is going on, he has also managed to write a rip-roaring adventure complete with monsters, blimps, and high-diving horses.

-Lynn Evarts, Sauk Prairie High School, Prairie du Sac, WI
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