16-year-old Nicole, high school drama queen (on and off stage), dies and finds herself on Substation Fifteen, an afterlife campus for teenage suicides. She can’t, for the life of her, remember how she died, but she’s sure it wasn’t by her own hand. In thirty days Nicole faces the all-important Evaluation. If she can’t piece together the mystery of what actually killed her she won’t be moving on. Her only route to uncovering the truth is a fact-finding trip to Earth, beginning at her own funeral, where the facts she finds may be harder to piece together and accept than death itself.
Our journey unfolds simultaneously “up there” in Substation Fifteen and in Northern California, told by three, first-person teenage narrators: Nicole’s best friend, Isabel, a germaphobic young witch with undeniable gifts; Nicole’s romantic rival, Cassie, a tough girl hiding heartbreaking vulnerability; and Nicole “Dead Girl” herself, whose adoring single dad raised her on abundant love and one really big lie. This tale of hope and redemption will appeal to fans of afterlife storylines like 13 Reasons Why, If He Had Been With Me, and The Lovely Bones.
