This is a story of complication, death, and the discovery of natural selection. Darcy Patel, a precocious high schooler at the age of 17 was struck with the proposition to compose a work of her own that would last “forever”. To write a book. Soon after, a publisher offered her an exceptional offer for the book and gave her to opportunity to move to New York to be more involved and immersed with the publishing process and to simply try to become the “real writer”. To simply summarize Darcy’s work, it’s a Young Adult novel of a girl (Lizzie) who faked her death in a terrorist attack to stay alive, in which she is the lone survivor, and in the process of playing possum, became one of the rare humans who can cross into the afterworld/underworld …show more content…
In Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld, the chapters intersperse the life of Darcy and the fiction of Lizzie (her novel). As Darcy’s character evolves throughout the story, we witness many dynamic changes-such as the city, her life, the book edits, the people surrounding her, her shifting attitudes, and the constant self-doubt everyone …show more content…
The outcome is a highly engaging reading experience, which was enticed by Darcy’s chapters which were not only about a person’s life, but a window into the soul of publishing, with its daunting and unpleasant aspects. Darcy is portrayed as naïve and wide-eyed teen who’s just thought she reached the top point of her life, but that was before she crashes under the social pressure and constraint of being an author in a colossal city with its never-ending expenses. Eventually Darcy is taken in by the YA publishing elite despite her being 17, falls in love with another author, and has her heart broken. Westerfeld speckled the book with his various experiences from publishing and from his real