Afterworlds

Overview

Afterworlds tells two stories at once. In one, eighteen-year-old Darcy Patel skips her first semester of college to move to New York and revise the novel she sold before she'd even finished high school. In the other, we read that novel itself: the tale of Lizzie, a teenager who survives a terrorist attack at an airport by slipping briefly into the realm of the dead, and returns able to move between worlds of the living and the departed.

Westerfeld lets the two narratives comment on each other, chapter by chapter, as Darcy's real life and her invented one develop in tandem. Lizzie's story unfolds as a moody, romantic thriller, complete with an attraction to a guide who ferries souls between afterlife and world. Darcy's story is quieter but no less consequential, tracking her friendships, insecurities, and a new relationship as she learns what it means to call herself a writer.

The result is a novel about the act of noticing: how a life gets reshaped into narrative, and how the version on the page never quite matches the version that was lived.

A Novel About Making Novels

Afterworlds belongs to a small tradition of books that turn the writing process itself into a subject worth dramatizing, and it does so with an insider's eye toward the publishing industry Westerfeld knows well as an established author. Darcy's chapters function almost as a case study in how a manuscript gets shaped by editors, marketing expectations, and a young writer's own shifting sense of what her story is really about.

The Lizzie sections, by contrast, let Westerfeld indulge more directly in the supernatural romance conventions his fictional debut novelist is working within, giving readers a chance to watch a genre being built in real time rather than simply consumed. Threaded through both halves is a relationship between Darcy and another young author, handled with the same unremarkable ease Westerfeld gives to any of his characters' attachments. Taken together, the book sits at the intersection of metafiction and coming-of-age story, asking what it costs, emotionally and creatively, to mine one's own life for material.

Why Afterworlds Has Been Challenged

A recurring objection raised in review committee meetings centers on Darcy's relationship with a female love interest, with some parents arguing that a book assigned or shelved for teen readers should not present a same-sex relationship as a normal, unremarkable part of a young person's coming-of-age. That argument has been paired, in several complaints, with concern over scenes depicting physical intimacy between teenage characters, which objectors describe as inappropriate for the book's intended age group regardless of the characters' genders.

A separate line of criticism focuses on the Lizzie narrative, where the graphic aftermath of a terrorist attack and a teenager's romantic pull toward a death-associated figure have been flagged as tonally troubling material to place in front of adolescent readers. In the catalog tracked here, Afterworlds has drawn formal challenges in two states and three school districts, reflecting how these objections have moved from individual parent complaints into broader review processes.