[Review] What Comes After - Katie Bayerl

Summary: Mari never gave much thought to the afterlife before her untimely demise, but she certainly didn’t think it would be an experimental wellness enclave called Paradise Gate—a place where the newly dead go to sort out the unfinished business of their lives. She also didn’t think the biggest problem to plague her in life would follow her into the great beyond: her also recently deceased mother, Faye. Mari quickly realizes Faye is her unfinished business, and in order to move on to whatever’s next, she’ll have to find a way to forgive her dysfunctional mother for being no mother at all. But there’s so much to forgive: never holding down a steady job, never having a stable home, and abandoning Mari in the end.

It’s a lot to sort through, but faced with the possibility of being turned out into the abyss, Mari gets to work. She enrolls in the prescribed self- actualization classes (think: journaling, positive self-talk, and lots of Youga™). It all seems pretty hokey, but still, the assignments force Mari to confront difficult truths about her past.

When a shocking revelation about Mari’s death captures the attention of the afterlife media, Mari is suddenly in the spotlight, her messy history being judged by the whole realm. She finds escape in an equally troubled boy, who takes Mari to an obscure part of Paradise Gate and  introduces her to rebels who show Mari that this “wellness center” is not all  it pretends to be. With classmates disappearing and an afterlife revolution brewing, Mari must decide whether to play it safe or break the rules. At stake? Her eternal fate. Literally. (Pub Date: Apr 29 2025)

I suspect this wasn't the book for me, but at least the last quarter made up for everything that had been making the read less interesting.

3+

I had three comparisons as I read this story. At first, for a long time, I couldn't not think of The Good Place.

You suddenly die and end up in this post-life community with weird people acting very differently from what you'd expect? Plus, all the Big-Brother-like control of society, etc. The worldbuilding was very similar, even if it was obvious that the plot wouldn’t be.

As I read on, I started feeling that there was also a lot of The Sims. 

People have their emotions graded in colors, and you get points for achievements that you can use to buy stuff? I don’t even know how I didn’t think of that before.

Finally, and I think this is the comparison I'll take with me because it should have been the most obvious—it’s the myth of having to get into college.

We start with Mari realizing that she can have an actual life, not the struggle her mother had always put her through, if she just follows all the steps of the “recipe” to get into college and become someone. Right when she’s about to take her SATs, she dies. But the place her soul ends up in also has this limited time, in the middle of all the confusion—in this case, of having just died, and in college’s case, of being a teenager—to accumulate merits and be judged by some self-appointed people who claim it’s all for your own good. And if you don’t pass their evaluation? "Well, let’s not talk about it now." Poor Mari died and had to restart college admissions. In other words. But that’s just a theory.

Despite my three comparisons, the truth is that the book is like those with dystopian futures—only it’s not set in the future but in the… Beyond? We see an evolved society dictating rules that seem like the best thing anyone ever thought of—until you analyze them further. Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of that genre, so the reading dragged a lot. Moreover, even if it had a new coat of paint, at its core, it was still more of the same for these kinds of books—even though I could see glimpses of paths that, had it followed, I would have loved. Again, I was reading the wrong book for me, and I suspect fans of the genre will know how to appreciate it better.

Still, as I mentioned, the book does get better. I don’t know if the author felt freer nearing the end, but as we got to the climax—and especially during the denouement—small situations kept making me laugh and feel glad that I had stuck with it. "So this is why I had to go through all that information!"

Overall, this wasn’t the book for me, but I can see its appeal. The final stretch was the highlight, cooking up thoughts, making it memorable in the end.

Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.

Rating: 3 out of 5.