3/5 stars

What's it about? Jill “Doll” Blaine spends the afterlife providing comfort to the soon-to-be dead, but K. J. Boone, an unrepentant oil executive, proves a tricky case. Whimsical and oh so didactic.

How’d I find it? I picked up this copy at Octavia Books in New Orleans. I highly recommend their sturdy branded mugs as well.

Who will enjoy this book? Though no one writes like Saunders, the themes might remind one of Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible or Atavists.

What stood out? Spending time with Jill as she tries to shepherd Boone into the next phase of existence includes unbidden memories of her life, passages in which quotation marks signal forgotten language and preoccupations. The tension between Jill’s mission and her longing for her human past provide the novel’s most interesting tension, but the heavy-handedness of its climate change message and attempts to evoke God overpower this element.

Which line made me feel something? Saunders uses the concept of inevitability to drum up empathy for his less likable characters: “…what looked to him like choices had been so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon him that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.”