The Afterlife of Walter Augustus

A bit obvious, uneventful and a miss for me.

As always this review is based on my experience of reading this book and not reflective of the actual content or story for a broader audience (I say because I'm not particularly glowing in my rating!).

If I had this on holiday then I may have warmed to it a little more. It definitely feels like the kind of book that doesn't require much thinking.

I found the twist “baddie” very obvious but at the same time lots of the story moved forwards without any real reason.

I came away from reading the book like it had been 100 pages or so. Maybe it's because I felt like the characters didn't have any depth - the sister Victoria is cruel and unkind to the protagonist Letty, but it seems for no reason other than to make a bad character (in the living world).

Then there's Walter, living in the afterlife (or the interim, or maybe even purgatory...), it's unclear why he's been there for so long - what was special about his name. He wrote a book of poem, god knows how many hundreds of years prior to the current day, so I'm not entirely sure why he doesn't pass on.

Later we meet Hector. I'm not sure how he's part of Walters “life”. Maybe it was explained and I skimmed idly past it, or perhaps it's just some rando that has a larger part to play - and even then, when Hector plays his hand, he kind of just falls off the pages.

All in all, a bit of a miss for me.

3.5 Stars

First off I want to say thank you to the author for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review and for allowing me to take part in the blog tour.

This book is told from 2 POV. One being from Walter in the Afterlife and the other being from Letty who is still living. Each chapter switches between the two and at first I wasn't getting how these two “stories” had anything to do with each other. I say stories because that's how it felt at first. It felt like I was reading 2 different stories in one book but they did eventually come together and make sense.

Lets start with Walter. Like I mentioned above he is in the Afterlife. He is actually in the interim waiting for everyone on earth to forget him so he can move on to the next stage of the afterlife and be with his wife again. I find the concept of this book to be unique and I definitely enjoyed reading it.

I'm not going to go into details here because of spoilers but there are some things that happens that brings some other characters into play. My issue here is how Walter went along with everything this character said even though it was so clear that he couldn't be trusted.

Next up is Letty. I think I enjoyed reading the chapters from her POV at first but eventually they both started to have aspects that annoyed me so much. Letty is a grown woman yet she lets her sister walk all over her and talk down to her and that really started to bug me. There was a lot of character growth with Letty though because she does eventually stand up for herself.

One other thing that didn't really bother me so much as I just don't understand the big deal about it and that is her whole money situation. If this was me I would be looking at it as a good thing not as a bad thing.

This book was a little slow going at first but it eventually pulled me in. I enjoyed some of the poems that were included throughout as well. Like I've said I think the concept was unique and I did overall enjoy the story.