Sunday, March 20, 2016

What is Judy Sheehan reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Judy Sheehan, author of I Woke Up Dead at the Mall.

Her entry begins:
I’m reading Lucia Berlin’s posthumous short story collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women. It’s mesmerizing, terrifying, depressing, and enlightening. At this point, it has instilled a deep fear of old age for me. Early death seems preferable to Berlin’s description of the despair and helpless confusion of those lost, late years. She has an eerie ability to pull an enormous amount of information into a small gaggle of words. It’s intimidating. She’s been dead for a dozen years, but I still imagine meeting her. She’d see right through me. She’d blow smoke in my general direction and dismiss me. But she would...[read on]
About I Woke Up Dead at the Mall, from the publisher:
When Sarah wakes up dead at the Mall of America, she learns that not only was she murdered, her killer is still on the loose. I WOKE UP DEAD AT THE MALL is a terrifically fun & voicey YA novel that tackles some of life’s – and the afterlife’s – biggest questions.

When you’re sixteen, you have your whole life ahead of you. Unless you’re Sarah. Not to give anything away, but . . . she’s dead. Murdered, in fact. Sarah’s murder is shocking because she couldn’t be any more average. No enemies. No risky behavior. She’s just the girl on the sidelines.

It looks like her afterlife, on the other hand, will be pretty exciting. Sarah has woken up dead at the Mall of America—where the universe sends teens who are murdered—and with the help of her death coach, she must learn to move on or she could meet a fate totally worse than death: becoming a mall walker.

As she tries to finish her unfinished business alongside her fellow dead teens, Sarah falls hard for a cute boy named Nick. And she discovers an uncanny ability to haunt the living. While she has no idea who killed her, or why, someone she loves is in grave danger. Sarah can’t lose focus or she’ll be doomed to relive her final moments again and again forever. But can she live with herself if she doesn’t make her death matter?
Visit Judy Sheehan's website.

Writers Read: Judy Sheehan.

--Marshal Zeringue