I did not know anything about this book before reading it, and from the start I did not particularly like the main character Pierce. In no particular order:
- Pierce describes herself as a princess: super attractive thanks to her mother, and super rich thanks to her father's job. Finally! A book with a main character exactly like me! NOT.
- Pierce keeps referring to 'the accident', which is different from 'the incident'; Cabot holds off from telling the reader what happened for both of these for awhile to build suspense or whatever. The accident is revealed after only a little frustration, but the incident is not described until probably 3/4 of the way through this book, which was maddening because Pierce refers to these and you as the reader just have to shout uselessly that you have no idea what she's talking about! Which brings me to...
- Pierce is dumber than a bag of rocks. Her number one line/thought in the entire book is "I don't understand", closely followed by "What are you talking about?". She also has zero ability to use context clues to try to put anything together, and a few times just lets her mind wander away from the conversation because she doesn't understand.
- Pierce is SO STUPID! "who is Homer?" "I'm an NDE and have spent hours researching death online but I'm so completely stupid because I have no idea what's going on for the entire book." Spoiler: She dies, then goes to some sort of underworld but is literally like, "where am I? Why am I cold? Why is there no cell service?" and doesn't figure out that she's dead, despite remembering dying, until being told, all this is after the reader has suffered through her stupidity for 20 minutes.
- There is basically no plot to this book. The whole thing is maybe two days time in the present voice, the entire rest of the book is flashbacks, dreams, mysterious boring ramblings...
- She spends a huge amount of time fearing John and not wanting to really have anything to do with him SPOILER: considering he wanted her to stay with him in the underworld for eternity, and there was a big bed there so he would probably want to do "that" *gasp* with her. FFS she is now 17 and every guy in the book is like 'ur pritty' and she's like 'ew boys! cooties! I can't say or think the word sex!'
Anyway~ Pierce is afraid of John, as she probably should be, but then the cemetery sexton (those two words were ridiculously over-used) says "be nice to John. [the guy who is scary and abusive and mysterious and who wants to keep you captive]" and she realizes then that yeah, this is a relationship she should try for because she's always secretly had a thing for him. (They've met like 4 times in total? For a max of an hour??)
- The end is also stupid. Obviously it's not all resolved because it's book 1, I understand, but her attitude at the end makes no sense.
- The Coffin Day subplot was pointless and led nowhere.
- CHECK YOURSELF BEFORE YOU WRECK YOURSELF. OMFG I will punch anyone who ever says this to me.
- One thing that may have made the audiobook different is the narrator~ Natalia Payne. I didn't think her voice was annoying, and she did multiple voices for the characters pretty well. However, I think there were lines that were supposed to be humorous and they were not delivered that way. I guess it's an interpretation, but this narrator did not do much for me. Don't want to blame her, probably was doing the best with what she had to work with.

I was just super disappointed by this Cabot book. I've really loved her previous books quite a lot.