From The Other Side by Julia Harrison

From The Other Side by Julia Harrison
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Romance, Paranormal, Contemporary
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Alyssa wasn’t ready to die. Snatched from her life and unable to access her most recent memories, she is cast into an afterlife that is very different from anything she expected. She is stuck on Earth, invisible to the living, and she is being hunted. Cornered by a malevolent being, Alyssa is saved by new friends who show her how to survive this strange world she never knew existed. A chance meeting leaves her inexplicably drawn to the enemy, and she starts to question if the line between good and evil is as clear cut as she’d been told. When she suspects her new family are lying to her, who can she trust?

Death was the beginning, not the end.

I enjoyed the ambiguity of this novel. There were many shades of grey in the characters, and few if any of them were purely good or bad individuals regardless of what my first impressions of them might have been. This meant that my allegiances shifted as I read and I changed my opinions about certain characters multiple times as I either learned new information about them or revisited old clues about what they were truly like.

There were some pacing issues that made it difficult for me to remain highly interested in what would happen next despite how excited I was when I first began reading. I liked the fact that so many different genres were included, but this did mean that some scenes needed to be stretched out in order to incorporate multiple themes and tropes, not all of which are necessarily easy to blend together. Patience was key while reading this, although there were times when I wished the next action scene would show up more quickly as certain sections included a lot of dialogue before and after these moments.

The ending fit the tone and themes nicely. While there were a few twists in it that I can’t discuss here for spoiler reasons, I enjoyed seeing how everything was woven together in the last few scenes as Alyssa learned a few more key pieces of information that helped to explain some moments that had been rather mysterious to this reader up until that point. It was satisfying to finally know why some characters behaved the way they did and why others sometimes made choices that didn’t always seem to fit what I already knew about their personalities.

From The Other Side was a wild ride.