shit from a butt. a very interesting premise that was just butchered.

I'll start with saying I listened to perhaps the worst audiobook of my life which didnt help, so perhaps my thoughts are shaded by that. This narrator made such awful choices and seemed to intentionally make the mom and Sophia physically have the most annoying voices so I'd be more compelled to hate them, leaving them to be even flatter characters than they already were. FURTHER she gave Billy, A MAN who I think is supposed to be 27 like Jet, the most raspy, rugrat, 7 year old voice she could do. It was genuinely a hard listen made even more egregious when the story has him sing a song (which the narrator didnt even kinda do a sing-songy voice for), and while he sang, Jet said he had a raspy quality to his voice that he didn't have while speaking. So, CANONICALLY he does not have a raspy talking voice. WHAT WAS THE REASON? TO SPITE ME?

The beginning was a decent and classic mystery but the writing and characterization was so off. I knew going into the book that this was the first adult fiction book by this author and it was so painfully obvious that she was having trouble transitioning: so many characters read years younger than they were supposed to, Jet especially, who is the most unbelievable 27 year old of all time, the narrative voice was irritating in the way it is to listen to a 13 year old with incessant swearing. I think Jackson was trying to use swearing to age up Jet but there's nothing more teenager than swearing when you dont need to ("fuck" and its variants alone was used 99 times).

Character motivations were so weak to me and plots were often left incomplete. I just had such a hard time believing that anyone would react to certain situations in the way that they did, whether it was attacking someone or just reacting to something that happened in general. There was a secret that someone was holding over Jets head and when its revealed we are supposed to agree with the characters at first that it was a bad thing she did, but its just so... nothing.

That's what a lot of this story felt like: nothing. There was just very little merit to what I was reading and I was just hoping so badly that the end of the book would make up for it all! It didn't.

You never really get to spend enough time with her family and how all of these horrible events affect everyone which makes it harder to connect with. The scene with Jets death was genuinely sad and the short chapters after too, I was really emotional then. That was just the only time I felt like that.

The very end of the story sucked phenomenally and was bogged down by the most self-congratulatory monolog from a character I think could have had a more interesting ending than that.

Im so tired of this story man, what a bummer

"Not Quite Dead Yet" by Holly Jackson feels like it should have been marketed as YA rather than adult fiction, and I suspect teens would actually enjoy this more than I did. As someone who's never read Jackson before and likely won't again, I found this deeply disappointing. The writing is stilted throughout, giving the book a rushed quality even though I think Jackson was attempting to create an edgy tone. Instead of coming across as sophisticated, it feels forced and amateurish.

The premise is intriguing initially—the only reason this gets even one star—but the plot quickly becomes absurd. There are two major "twists" that completely defy logic. When Jet discovers that Sophia is literally poisoning her father, she confronts her and then does absolutely nothing else. No police, no urgency, just inexplicable inaction. Even more baffling is the revelation about Billy's mother, who apparently left because she suspected her husband was a murderer but then abandoned her son with this same suspected killer. Jet herself is unbearable as a protagonist, constantly joking about being murdered and then sulking when no one finds it funny.

Alex McKenna's narration makes the experience even worse. While I'm sure she put considerable effort into the performance, her male voices are atrocious; Billy sounds like he's going through puberty when he's supposed to be in his late twenties. The female characters all come across as whining, particularly Jet's mother. The entire production feels like something that belongs on the CW: outlandish without being entertaining, poorly executed without being charming. Save your time and credits for something better.