Review: The Afterlife of the Party by Marlene Perez

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Release Date: February 2nd, 2021

Genre(s): Young Adult, Fantasy, Paranormal

Publisher: Entangled Teen

Pages: 352

Rating:⭐️⭐️

Note: Thank you to NetGalley and Entangled Teen for sending me an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Synopsis

The Afterlife of the Party follows Tansy, who is dragged to a party in Hollywood Hills by her best friend Skyler, and leaves one as a vampire. Now her and Skyler are stuck on the road as groupies with a band of vampires. But when the girls find themselves within a vampire war, will Tansy be able to save her friends?

Review

I personally was never really much of a paranormal reader back with the original wave of vampire content in YA books and TV/film, but lately, I’ve been enjoying it much more. So when I saw The Afterlife of the Party available for request, I thought it would be a great fit for me. There’s vampires, there’s bands, and it sounded like a really unique adventure and an interesting start to a trilogy. And while the plot did prove itself to be unique and fun, I wish we got so much more out of the book.

The Afterlife of the Party takes place in our present day, but with the presence of paranormal creatures like vampires and witches. Tansy is a witch herself, and upon finding this out early on in the book, I was excited to learn more about the world and how witches tied into the story. However, I feel like we never really got that. There’s never any sort of in-depth, fleshed out explanations about the paranormal worldbuilding and the detailed origins or backstories of paranormal life. Each time I thought there would be more depth, the explanations barely scraped the surface, and I was really hoping we’d see more of that, at least in the first book.

I also struggled with the characters at times. They are supposed to be in their late teens, but if I didn’t know better I would have considered these characters to be tweens by their levels of maturity. That being said, this book might be better suited for readers around the age of thirteen, but if your expectations are for older teenage characters, you may find that they act much younger for their age. Ultimately, I feel like their behavior conflicted with the situations that they were in because of this. Despite this, I really did like the exploration of Tansy and Vaughn’s relationship as they navigated everything that was thrown at them throughout the book.

At the end of the day, I feel like The Afterlife of the Party has a really cool and fun concept, but I really wish we got more details and backstory than was there. I find paranormal stories to be much more interesting and fun when there’s more to learn about the world behind the paranormal characters themselves, and I do wish that this book had more of that as the first in the series – I would love to see more of these explorations (especially Tansy’s family and history as a witch) in book two.