"This book is so wonderful. The ending to Dead Girl Diaries makes sense of life." ~ Veronica Ross
ISBN 978-0-9783793-8-4
BookLand Press
When a young university student is assigned the task of writing her obituary by her Journalism professor, she procrastinates. Who wants to think about their own death?
An obituary is really about life – how one has lived it – and the assignment sends Maxine down a road of hopes and dreams, what she imagines her life to be.
But life doesn’t unfold in the way Maxine thinks it will. Stopping along a dark highway to help a stranger with car trouble, Maxine is attacked and left for dead at the side of the road.
But like her life, Maxine’s death is full of unexpected twists of fate. Her ghost tells the tale from the otherworld, an unearthly place where a renegade angel helps her escape the boredom of paradise, and God makes random appearances as a disembodied Voice, a snoring mountain and a manic rock star. Maxine, it seems, is never as much alive as when she is dead.
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"The narrative is clever, often witty, audacious and ironic. Marianne Paul gives full play to her knowledge of religion and the supernatural in this story that allows her to weave in and out of the spirit world with relative equanimity. Indeed even Einstein (he of the Theory of Relativity) comes to Maxine’s defence that it’s all relative—life and death, belief and non-belief, transmigration of souls. Go, ask the Buddha, she says as if to confirm what she and her ghost knows." - Ben Antao
"The writing in Dead Girl Diaries took me away - the poetry and the force. Paul writes in a manner that I would call a novel of ideas, where the characters are driven by ideas. Even their dialogue is created so as to move forward the purpose of the telling, which is to underline the theme of hope, of continuance or relative truth, and always dynamic change. I call it walking on the water of moving earth. This is the image as I see it, and how I would describe the theme of the book." ~ Elaine Auerbach
Dead Girl Diaries will challenge you to step outside traditional literary boundaries and ponder some of life’s fundamental questions." - Michael Dyet
