Another Life
By Robert Haller
Description
Vacation Bible School got a little out of hand this year.

Laura: a teenage girl struggling to fit into her small, sleepy town in upstate New York, slowly drifting away from reality and into the secret life she inhabits online. Paul: a twentysomething wannabe rock star, back home from New York City, broke and jobless, living with his mother. April: a math teacher with two kids, running her church’s Vacation Bible School, discontent with another summer planning crafts and regurgitating verses. Ben: a boy stuck at VBS, still adjusting to the presence of his foster brother, DeShawn, a quiet, brooding kid from Brooklyn.

Over the course of one summer, these characters’ paths will collide in surprising, often hilarious ways. Encompassing questions of identity, religion, race, and family, Another Life is an absorbing and thought-provoking debut about the line we all walk between desire and responsibility.

I want to first thank NetGalley for the advance copy for review of the book.
Whew, I wanted to like the book, but there was so much going on. I think Laura was the only person I could connect with. Then she became lost in the VBS doing. So many people and situations.

Thanks netgalley for the preview copy! The description of this book pulled me in right away. However, it seems like this book still needs some work. There were typos, missing words and formatting issues in many parts of the book as well as random insertions of the authors name in the middle of sentences. I found inconsistencies in the characters i.e. a 16 year old girl mentioning she started going to church when her ex husband left her. There were many flashbacks that seemed out of order and were then contradicted by the next narrators point of view. I honestly feel like there was too much put into this book.
Spoiler alert: there’s a gay pastors daughter who lies and sneaks around, drug use, a 20’s something having an affair with a single mom in her 40’s and while this is going on he goes on a bender and impregnates another 20 something, a family who takes in a foster child but their biological child is racist and cruel towards the foster child, and then there’s a 16 year old girl cat fishing a man who turns out to be a sex offender. Oh and did I mention she attends an anti abortion rally in order to go meet him-the storylines just seem to be trying too hard. I think the general premise would have been a good book if it wasn’t packed with so many whammy’s that seem to come out of nowhere.