One Death, Nine Stories

What I Liked:
One Death, Nine Stories didn’t really scream Christina book, but I couldn’t resist the premise of the anthology. It actually turned out to be much cooler than I was even expecting. I thought they’d be essentially companion stories by different people associated with the deceased. That’s true, but they’re also interlocking and codependent. It’s more of a cohesive novel than I was expecting. It’s a multiple POV novel from nine different authors. One Death, Nine Stories is a really neat idea and I hope to see more collaborations like this one in the future.

Of course, I probably wouldn’t have taken a reading risk like this one had the book not been so short. I started One Death, Nine Stories at 10 PM last night and had two stories left by midnight, even though I wasn’t very focused. It’s only 140 pages of stories, with the rest of the page count being associated material like author bios. It’s an easy risk to take, because, like it or not, it doesn’t take a huge chunk of your reading time. In my case, the risk paid off.

Singularly, the stories mostly aren’t subject matter that I would want to read as a book, but the way they all tie together is amazing. The best example is Ellen Hopkins’ story. I didn’t really like it because the first person POV is this guy Mick, who has really racist and sexist attitudes. He didn’t learn anything and I wasn’t a fan of that. However, at that point, you don’t really know too much about the deceased and, in learning more about Kevin, I had a bit of a new stance on Mick by the end. The stories really do impact one another.

Kevin Nicholas we see first as a body in a bag. He’s tall, but that’s almost all we know. Then we see him as an altar boy, having his first sexual experience. Some of the stories are memories of him in his youth, while others are as recent as a couple of days before he died. Some of the stories really focus on Kevin’s impact on the person’s life, while, in others, his death is merely a launching off point for things that person needs to deal with because they didn’t know Kevin at all. In the beginning, all the reader sees is the mourning family and the expressions of sadness at his loss, but the picture becomes less simplistic with all the new information in each story.

As is not usually the case with anthologies, there wasn’t a single story that dragged. They were all fast-paced and interesting. I will say, though, that I didn’t really get why one story was in there. It’s from the POV of someone whose cousin knew Kevin and he sees about the death on Facebook. He starts thinking about Kevin’s death a bit, sure, but mostly it’s about his football practices. I think the death was supposed to have some strange impact on how he lives his life, but that wasn’t really conveyed effectively to me. It wasn’t a bad story per se, but I didn’t think it fit as well with the others.

The Final Verdict:
If you enjoy novels that experiment with different formats or are interested in author collaborations, I urge you to check out One Death, Nine Stories. It’s different from a lot of YA or, actually, NA, since the characters are 18 and over for the most part and, hey, it’s super short so why not?