What Comes After, by Katie Bayerl

When Mari dies, she finds herself in Paradise Gate, a way station where one decides if your next stop will be the Afterlife or the Eternal Abyss of 3am.  She has ninety days to redeem herself, earning points by focusing on positive emotions, practicing "youga," and eating lots of kale.  But it's a hard path.  Her mother, who died a few days before her and thus has little time remaining, is in danger of flunking her exams and ending up in the Abyss.  Mari could soon follow.

As Mari struggles to sort her life out (beginning with a big question of why she died), she comes to understand that something is wrong at Paradise Gate.  People do not necessary pass on and Mari discovers evidence that the leaders are corrupt and the system is crumbling.  When she steps forward and joins a plot to expose the corruption, surprising things happen.

Billed as a farce, the story does start off as strong satire.  Life after death, it seems, is basically set up like a high school with meaningless classes, social cliques, exam pressure, and lots of sneaking about.  Once the gimmicks of this world are defined however, Bayerl gets lost.  The novel is stuck in a literary dead end.  To dig out, we get the strange drama of a conspiracy, an underground, and a revolution.  But the revolution doesn't really work either, so the ending becomes a jumpy montage of third party accounts which avoid the need to really tell Mari's story anymore.  Every thing wraps up nicely in the end, but the story withers away.  Cute concept, but never really reached its potential.