Otherwise
By Jennifer B. White
Review brought to you by OBS staff member Autumn
Reluctantly, Delilah Gray has returned to her childhood home—a ramshackle cottage where her compulsive, hoarding grandmother, Meema, raised her. Meema’s ghostly manifestations refuse to let Delilah clean the filthy house, or to stay there peacefully. And that’s just the beginning of Delilah’s problems.
Lonely, angry, and hiding a painful secret, she tries to find a place for herself in a town that she once discovered was “in-between”—a portal to the worlds of the supernatural. Upon her arrival, Delilah unwittingly gets caught in the middle of important business between The Keeper, whose job it is to keep souls on the physical plane, and The Sender who helps speed the dead on their afterlife journey.
When Delilah discovers that she is connected to Lily Defoe, a woman who leapt to her death many years ago, and to a man who refers to himself as The Gravedigger for Lost Souls, she realizes there is more to her homecoming than she anticipated. Who she is, and who she’s been, crosses the boundaries of life and death. Nothing—not the people she meets, not this very moment in time, not even the tragic death of her daughter—is what it appears to be. Not only does Delilah have her own “soul searching” to do, but she must work with some of Green Lake’s oddest characters to uncover the mysteries of several unsolved deaths that have never been forgotten.
While strange and supernatural occurrences threaten Delilah’s already fragile emotional state, she still has a crucial choice to make that will change everything. She comes to understand that there are some things that are worse than death. There is Otherwise—to be confined to a twilight state between the spiritual and the physical worlds. (Goodreads)
Review:
Have you ever read a book that with the turn of each subsequent page, you knew exactly what was going to happen next? Well, Otherwise is not one of those books.
Delilah Gray has led a very tragic life. Abandoned by her mother and raised by her hoarding grandmother, she yearned for the days when she could be free. Tragedy continues to follow her into her new life with an unhappy marriage and the death of her only child. She finds herself back in the town of Green Lake once again.
Her grandmother left her the house that was once a source of pain for her growing up. She somehow feels that cleaning out the house will help her wounds. Only every time she does, the hoard appears all over again.
She meets a handsome gravedigger named Shane, who mysteriously has to leave at the same time every day. She feels strangely connected to him. Can this be all her imagination?
Add in the strange cast of characters that comprise the town of Green Lake. Each with secrets of their own and you get an incredible tale of lost souls that question if it is possible that you can choose not to die.
I loved that Otherwise kept me guessing right to the very end. Just when you think that you had the mystery solved, you were thrown another wicked curve-ball. It’s a brilliant combination of a ghost story, a murder mystery and a tender tale of young love. There is dead and then there is Otherwise. What’s not to devour?
