Elegy (Hereafter #3) Review

Elegy (Hereafter #3)
by Tara Hudson
Genre: YA Paranormal
Format: ARC obtained through Around the World ARC Tours in exchange for my honest review. I do not get to keep these books.
Midnight Minute: Amelia is Risen, but her time is running out.  Can she save the people she loves without condemning herself to hell?
Expected Publication: 06.04.13
From Goodreads:

A stalker ghost, misguided Seers, and spellbinding wraiths—Amelia Ashley has faced them all. Now her greatest hope is to spend the rest of her afterlife with her living boyfriend, Joshua. But the demonic forces return to give her an ultimatum: turn herself over to the darkness or watch them murder one living person per week until she does.

Amelia fears she might really be doomed, until the forces of light give her another option. She can join them in their quest to gather souls, with a catch: Once she joins them, she can never see Joshua again.

Faced with impossible choices, Amelia decides to take her afterlife into her own hands—and fight back.

Midnight Thoughts:

~ I really need there to be some awesome website available only to people who have read a book to be able to access that's like a Cliff Notes for earlier books in the series.  Because while I read and reviewed the first two books, my memory of the second book was pretty spotty.  Possibly because there were a lot of new characters introduced then, and this one opens up with several new ones.  Seriously, I need a cheat sheet!
~ It didn't take long to remember the special relationship between Amelia and Joshua, as their love is as sweet as it can get between a boy and the ghost he loves.
~ So, in this book, Ameila is Risen, which means she can be seen by all humans as long as she wishes.  She just can't touch them.  Which sucks for her love life, but also in her day to day interactions, because even non-touchy people touch more people than they probably think they do on a daily basis. 
~ The book immediately grabbed me when Amelia attends a sleepover with Jill and her friends.  They begin to play Truth or Dare and I'm like, meh.  But then someone throws down with a Bloody Mary dare and I lose my shiz.  Bloody Mary terrifies me like nothing else. I've already mentioned it before, but mirrors in the dark at night scare the crap out of me because of Bloody Mary.  
~ Kade, whom I only slightly remember from the last book, makes a special guest appearance in the mirror and he's no friendly after-life messenger.  In fact, the actual Bloody Mary probably would have been preferable in Amelia's opinion. 
~ Kade and the bridge ghosts give her an ultimatum: either Amelia goes to him, or a friend of hers will die every week.  Which sucks, but I'm thinking, how close of a friend are we talking about?  Because I have lots of Facebook 'friends' that I don't really know so...
~ Jillian is definitely one of my favorite characters in this book.  She's really grown and now that she's found love (not telling who  though!) it's really matured her and balanced out her bitchiness.  But not too much, because I like that she's not as goody goody as Amelia and Josh.
~ There are some Scooby Gang hijinks at the bridge as Amelia and friends try to bring it down. 
~ I think if I were the Mayhew clan, I'd have just moved to a really dry state like Arizona or Nevada...
~ Okay, I made a joke about how safe it was for Amelia and Joshua to date, especially since in the last book she kept dissipating every time they made out, but once again there's an obstacle preventing them from getting their groove on.  But does it count if you lose your virginity to a ghost?  Is it like in the show True Blood where Jessica regenerates her virginity all the time?  Am I the only that thinks about this stuff?
~ Jillian snores.  Just so you know. 
~ Eli makes a brief appearance, but not enough to satisfy me.  I liked him.
~ Serena is back and there is a scene between her and Amelia that creeped the hell out of me.  
~ Grandma Ruth is back, and she's more badass than ever.  Seems she's fully recovered from the last book. 
~ Despite all that Amelia is dealing with, she still gets some great human moments.  Most notably: Prom.  Of course, any prom with Amelia and Joshua runs the risk of being the worst prom since Carrie by Stephen King. ~ The ending is a page turner, with Hudson offering glimpses into hell that were truly frightening. 
~ I may have cried, but I think the ending was a good one for this series. 

Timeless Characters:

Amelia- our ghostly heroine is back, and more alive than ever!
Joshua- the human boy she loves.  He's kind of perfect.
Jillian- Joshua's sister, slightly reformed mean girl.
Scott- Joshua's bff who helps out.
Liz- Amelia's mom, still mourning her daughter.
Serena- Amelia's bestie back in her living days... you know, before demons possessed her and she killed Amelia.
Kaylen- Jillian's wealthy best friend.
Kade LaLaurie- baddie from book two, ghost baddie now. 
Eli- restless spirit from the first two books.
Grandma Ruth- despite her ghost prejudices, it's hard not to enjoy this woman.
Belial- Master Demon.  Seriously.  He had to go to demon school an extra two years to get that title. 
Melissa- Eli's dead girlfriend, she's a slightly close-lipped version of Casper. 
Drew, Hayley, Annabelle, and Felix- New Orleans crew from the last book.
O'Reilly- Joshua's cool friend.

Midnight Moment:

The promise Amelia elicits from Jillian.  That's all I'm gonna say.

Stop The Clock:

Obviously, I was happy with this book, and if you've read the series than I think you'll be happy with the outcome.  Hudson could have gone all crazy with it, but she stayed true to the characters and it's a better series for it.  There's just not enough ghost stories out there, so I'm glad to have read this one.  Looking forward to future novels by the author!


Tara Hudson— Website |Tara Hudson

  Elegy (Hereafter #3) gets a Midnight Book Rating of: 

Arise Review

Arise (Hereafter #2)
by Tara Hudson
Expected Publication: 06.05.12
From Goodreads:

Amelia—still caught between life and death—must fight for every moment of her relationship with the human boy Joshua. They can hardly even kiss without Amelia accidentally dematerializing. Looking for answers, they go to visit some of Joshua’s Seer relatives in New Orleans. But even in a city so famously steeped in the supernatural, Amelia ends up with more questions than answers…and becomes increasingly convinced that she and Joshua can never have a future together.Wandering through the French Quarter, Amelia meets other in-between ghosts, and begins to seriously consider joining them. And then she meets Gabrielle. Somehow, against impossible odds, Gaby has found a way to live a sort of half-life...a half-life for which Amelia would pay any price. Torn between two worlds, Amelia must choose carefully, before the evil spirits of the netherworld choose for her.

My Thoughts:  Two things- first I really love ghost stories.  And thankfully at the moment, ghosts are popular.  Yay for ghosts!  Second- I did not realize when I signed up for the Arise arc tour that it was a second book in the Hereafter series.

Fail.

Luckily for me, despite being unfamiliar with the series, I was able to jump right in and enjoy Arise.  The only thing that confused me in the beginning was Jillian's age, she came across a lot younger until she jumped in her car and drove to school.  But that's okay, Jillian doesn't really matter.

I loved Joshua.  I loved how it was always Joshua and never Josh (it reminded me of Rachel in Friends and how she refused to shorten her boyfriend Joshua's name too). Joshua and Amelia have a really sweet love, a tad bit too co-dependent at times, but honestly, they're young, in love, and she's dead. 

And every time they make out, Amelia disappears.  Literally.  It's like the best teenage birth control method I have ever heard of.

I will totally let my kids date dead people.  Actually, maybe I should specify ghosts and not just dead people.  No one wants to raise a necrophiliac.

So, lots of stuff goes down in Arise, and I'm totally going to have to read the first book now, because of Eli.  We only briefly see him in the second book, but it sounds like he was a much bigger player and the cause of much trouble for our Amelia the friendly ghost in the first book.  Anyways, Eli is past, but the demons are back and they want Amelia to be their new Eli.  But even from this brief glimpse I realize that Eli was probably fairly bad boyish (bad ghostish?) in Hereafter.

And what does one do when confronted with the fact that demons may soon be torturing your loved ones if you don't help them?

That's right, road trip!

To New Orleans!   I love New Orleans, I love ghost stories set in New Orleans, and I love that Amelia ends up meeting new friend Gaby in a Voodoo store.  My only small complaint is that despite it being the most haunted city in America, there's only, like, five ghosts roaming around.  Not going to lie, that bugged me.

However, Amelia is all torn over Joshua and their relationship.  She's dealing with his grandma Ruth again, who totally tried to exorcise her in book one, and to top it off when they get to New Orleans Joshua's family has a Welcome to the House, Dead Girl teen seer gathering.

Seers can... see ghosts.  And other things.  Like we do.  Only it's like the Monster Squad of seers, so only two of them can see Amelia, but the rest can hear her.  Normally seers are all about banishing ghosts, but Joshua's cousins and friends appear to want to help Amelia.

Amelia is not immediately down with this.  She didn't just die yesterday, after all. She's got some good instincts, which is only cool when she actually listens to them. 

Besides all the demon fun, Amelia is also having strange dreams, which is unusual since as a ghost she doesn't really sleep.  And somebody is trying to send her a message about something.  It's still a little unclear as to what that message is, but I think it'll play in the next book.

For me this was a fun, fast read.  It was spooky, there was lots of action and some very pg romance, and even some humor- mostly in the form of Gaby.  And the place where Gaby lives = priceless.  I'm totally thinking about squatting in celeb's homes whilst they're away at rehab too.

So, by all means read Hereafter first.  I can't wait to read about Amelia and Joshua falling in love, so I will backtrack.  But if you for some reason find yourself with Arise like I did, not having read Hereafter will not negatively impact your reading experience of Arise.  Unless you're particularly dumb, but you probably wouldn't be reading at all if you were, so problem solved.

And I can't wait to read the next book!

Arise gets a Midnight Book Rating of:

The cover gets a Midnight Book Cover Rating of:

I love this cover, which is why I wanted to do the tour.  I love that you can see the cemetery through her.  You know immediately that this is a ghost story.  A lot of YA books have girls in pretty dressed on the cover, but they normally don't do a good job of actually advertizing the story between the pages.  But this book does.  Except the plant leaves in her hands.  Don't have a clue what those are supposed to mean, but I don't care.  It's still a great cover!

**Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from Around the World ARC Tours in exchange for my honest review.