Book Review: Level 2 by Lenore Appelhans

Level 2 by Lenore Appelhans
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: January 2013
Pages: 288
Source: ARC won during Lenore's Dystopian August
For: Fun!
Series: Memory Chronicles, Book 1

Felicia Ward is stuck in the sterile and changeless Level 2 of the afterlife. She spends her days reliving and rating memories of her former life, wishing she could have it all back. But, when she wakes up one day to find one of her friends dead and no one else remembers her, she discovers there is a lot more to Level 2 than she thought.

Things I Liked:
This was a unique and different feeling book.  I liked that it was set in the afterlife and that the action all pretty much takes place in someplace not among the living.  The action was pretty well-paced and the story took some exciting twists and turns, though I saw some of the surprises coming.  It was a solid story with interesting characters.  I was most interested in knowing about Felicia's life on earth (which sounds ironic, considering what I said about the setting) but the story set in the afterlife seemed very vague.  Still, because she seemed so obsessed with what she did, I wanted to know more.  I did really enjoy reading the annotated copy that I won from Lenore - that made it so much more enjoyable, I think.

Things I Didn't Like:
For some reason, the whole thing didn't seem to come together for me.  Perhaps the distracting placement of visiting her memories kept me from feeling like it meshed.  Or, it could have been that I just didn't think I had enough information about the Morati, what Level 2 was like, or why Felicia was so willing to go and do what random people asked her to.  The ending also left me with way more questions than answers to what happened.  It was almost like Felicia forgot what happened before with her Level 2 friends Virginia and Beckah.  Interesting and I'll likely pick up the next one, but didn't blow me away.

Read-alikes:
A little bit like Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin
And for another afterlife aspect, the Riley Bloom series by Alyson Noel

BOOK CONTENT RATINGS:
s-factor: !@
a few here and there, one or two f-bombs

mrg-factor: X
some implied (and a seducing scene)

v-factor: ->
just one scene near the end kind of got me, but not really described

Overall rating: ***

What were your thoughts about this book?

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