June’s featured book is the first book I read by one of my favorite authors: Everlost by Neal Shusterman. I fell in love with Shusterman’s writing after reading this book, and the Skinjacker trilogy that Everlost is a part of and the Unwind Dystology are some of my favorite books ever. Reading Everlost again this month was an absolute pleasure, and I hope I have time soon to read the rest of the series as well.

In the book, Everlost is a place between life and death, an in-between world where children who don’t “get where they’re going” end up. It is a mysterious and dangerous world, full of lost souls and crossed-over objects, and if you stand in the same place to long you sink to the center of the earth. Everlost follows Nick and Allie, who don’t survive a car crash and end up in Everlost. They want to go home but forget more about their lives the longer they stay. They meet mother-like Mary Hightower, who guards hundreds of kids in the crossed-over Twin Towers in New York City, and Nick feels like he has found a comfortable home. But Allie isn’t satisfied and keeps looking for a way back home, eventually getting Nick caught up in her plans aboard the crossed-over ship captained by the McGill, a fearsome monster who crawled his way back to the earth’s surface after sinking to its center.

This book is probably the only paranormal story I like, and that’s because while the kids in Everlost are inbetween life and death, they’re not really ghosts. They’re Afterlights, so named because they have a glow about them. All of the details Shusterman includes—the sinking to the center of the earth, the fact that well-loved items cross over to Everlost when they’re destroyed, the mysterious and unidentifiable coins that everyone crosses over with, and the sometimes humorous fact that everyone crosses over in exactly what they died in (including a chocolate smear on Nick’s face, a wet Speedo, and several Halloween costumes)—make Everlost rich and exciting. And I’ve definitely never read anything quite like this before.

I think my favorite part of the book though is the omniscient point of view. This story could have been well done in Allie’s or Nick’s perspectives, or even both. But Shusterman made an excellent choice making this story omniscient. We get a peek into the heads of all the character’s this way, and this allows Shusterman to do my favorite quality of his writing: Shusterman uses the omniscient narrator to take you into the both the villains’ and side characters’ heads and beautifully characterize them in even as little as a paragraph. He puts the omniscient point of view to its best use by really getting deep into all of the characters (no matter how brief) to give the readers all of the different perspectives.

I’ve never tried writing in an omniscient point of view. It is a difficult POV to use because it usually puts a distance between the reader and the characters. However, Shusterman navigates around this and gives us an omniscient narrator who both makes you laugh and gives you great insight into each character.