After Life – Gayle Forman (2025)

After Life by Gayle Forman, published in 2025, is a haunting and heartfelt exploration of love, loss, identity, and the ineffable spaces between life and death. Known for her emotionally resonant storytelling, Forman crafts a gripping narrative through the voice of Amber Crane, a teenage girl who returns home one day to discover the unthinkable – she has died, seven years ago. What follows is a deeply emotional journey through fractured time, memory, and grief, as Amber confronts the consequences of her absence and the unrecognizable lives of those she left behind. This poignant novel stands as a testament to the enduring power of love and the human need for connection.

Plot Summary

Amber Crane always conquered the last hill on her ride home from school with a mixture of exhaustion and elation. Her legs would burn, the wind would whip her face, and once she reached the top, she would fly, gliding toward a home filled with warmth, familiarity, and the expectation of a future filled with prom dresses, graduation, and college plans. But on one ordinary spring day, the hill was too easy, her body too light, and everything that followed felt subtly off-kilter. The warmth was gone. The thermostat claimed comfort, but the air clung cold. The television wouldn’t turn on, her fingers fumbled with the phone, and her own memories betrayed her – names, dates, the feel of things she used to know.

Then the garage door opened, her mother stepped out, and screamed.

The world Amber returned to was not the one she left. Seven years had passed, and Amber, who had died in a hit-and-run bicycle accident, stood inexplicably whole, unchanged, and very much present. Her mother collapsed in disbelief, her sister – no longer the weird little girl obsessed with codes and secrets – was now a young woman with blue hair and a quiet strength. Melissa believed. She had grown up haunted by Amber’s death and now found herself confronted by a miracle she had dreamed of in a thousand coded notes and whispered prayers. Their father, Brian, whose science-rooted atheism once defined him, saw in Amber’s return the hand of something divine and met her with open arms and reverence.

The house Amber entered was not frozen in time but altered by grief. Her room, her belongings, the rose bush planted in her name – all hinted at the life that had continued without her. Her yearbooks were filled with messages from classmates who mourned her absence. Her favorite talk shows were off the air, and even her cat, Mr. Fluff, was gone. What Amber wanted – desperately – was to find something familiar, someone who might anchor her in this surreal continuation. She thought of Calvin.

Calvin Judd had once been the gentle giant who watched her from behind his ELA desk, sketching her unknowingly. On the last day of sophomore year, he had drawn a picture in her yearbook – a quiet confession of his feelings. They had grown close, shared secrets, promises, a future. When Amber died, he unraveled. He stopped chasing dreams and instead settled behind the bar of a place called the Bitter End. He carried the weight of her memory in sketches and scars. When Amber found him again, he didn’t recognize her at first, and then couldn’t let her go. His body was thinner, almost fragile, but the ache in his eyes was unmistakably the same.

Amber’s return sent quiet shockwaves through the people who had once defined her world. Her mother, Gloria, had never healed. The loss shattered her faith, her marriage, and her identity. She had once believed in divine order, in morning glories and new beginnings, but Amber’s reappearance only deepened her confusion. Her screams were not from joy, but from fear – that this miracle was another cruel twist, a hallucination, or worse. Brian tried to hold the family together, but their union, so deeply rooted in love and shared struggle, had fractured under the weight of Amber’s absence.

Melissa, who had idolized Amber and spent her childhood observing everyone like a spy, had long understood that people lived in contradictions. Amber had been kind and cruel, warm and aloof, but Melissa loved her all the same. And now, older and wiser, she became Amber’s guide in a world that no longer fit the shape of her memories. They explored the house together, opened boxes of old trophies and poems, and unearthed versions of Amber that had been frozen in time – preserved not as a person but as a memory.

One by one, the ghosts of Amber’s past revealed themselves. There was Mr. King, the ELA teacher who had once assigned an obituary writing project meant to help students envision their futures. Amber had been unable to complete hers. She could not see beyond her birthday. Now, her real obituary – clipped from the newspaper, printed in black ink, and saved in a folder – spoke of music therapy dreams and high school theater roles. It spoke of a life full of possibility, cut short.

The town had moved on. A mural was painted at the high school. A quote from Virginia Woolf marked the wall – a reminder that sometimes, one person’s death made others value life more. Amber was now a symbol, a lesson, a name etched in stone and ink and teenage memory. But she wasn’t gone. She was here, standing under fluorescent lights, shivering even in front of the fireplace her father built for her, unable to feel warmth, unable to truly breathe. She was a presence, but no longer part of the living rhythm of the world.

And still, she hoped. Hoped to reconnect with Calvin, to rekindle what they had. But time, relentless and unforgiving, had changed him. He had mourned her too deeply, lived too long with her absence. Their reunion stirred pain and longing, but also a kind of closure. Amber saw in his eyes the same devotion, but also the cost of her return. She was not the same, and neither was he.

She wandered through this unfamiliar version of her old life, searching not just for love or memory, but for a place to belong. Her presence forced her family to confront truths they had buried. Her mother’s unraveling was not just about grief, but about change – the collapse of belief, the crumbling of identity. Her father’s embrace of faith was both a rebellion and a healing. Melissa, the little girl once dismissed as odd, had become the voice of reason, the keeper of stories, and the one who helped Amber find her footing again.

No explanation came. No higher power revealed itself. Amber’s return remained unexplained – a break in the rules, a tear in the fabric of time. But in the silence between those who remembered her and the girl she had become, something sacred stirred. Amber did not belong to the world of the living anymore, but she also was not entirely gone. She existed in the in-between – where memory meets presence, where love lingers long after death.

And maybe that was enough.

Main Characters

• Amber Crane – The protagonist, Amber is a seventeen-year-old high school senior with plans, dreams, and a bright future ahead – until she dies in a hit-and-run accident. When she inexplicably returns seven years later, she is caught in a liminal space where she must confront the impact of her death on her family, her boyfriend, and her own identity. Amber’s journey is a poignant mix of self-discovery and existential reckoning, as she navigates the emotional terrain of being alive but not truly part of the world she once knew.
• Melissa “Missy” Crane – Amber’s younger sister, once a quirky and misunderstood child with spy-like tendencies, is now a mature, self-aware young woman. Missy serves as both a link to Amber’s past and a mirror of the time that has passed. Her capacity for belief and compassion anchors Amber, and her transformation from the “weirdo” little sister into a fierce and loyal young woman adds depth to the emotional narrative.
• Brian Crane – Amber’s father, a once-pragmatic atheist turned believer following Amber’s death and miraculous return. His unwavering love for his daughter and willingness to embrace the miraculous contrast sharply with the rest of the family’s reactions. His spiritual awakening and emotional openness play a crucial role in welcoming Amber back and grounding her fragile return.
• Gloria Crane – Amber’s mother, who responds to Amber’s return with fear, disbelief, and psychological unraveling. Her emotional breakdown represents the painful, paralyzing nature of grief, and her inability to reconcile the reality of Amber’s presence speaks to the cost of unresolved sorrow and the way it reshapes a person.
• Calvin Judd – Amber’s high school boyfriend, who never fully recovered from her death. Once full of promise, Calvin is now a hollowed version of himself, working at a dive bar and bearing the emotional scars of unresolved love. His encounter with Amber is one of the novel’s most raw and heart-wrenching scenes, as it reopens a wound neither time nor reason has managed to heal.

Theme

• Grief and Healing: The core of the novel centers on the many ways grief manifests – through paralysis, denial, transformation, and rebirth. Amber’s return doesn’t erase the pain her death caused; it amplifies it, revealing how deeply her absence reshaped her loved ones’ identities. The novel explores the non-linear, consuming nature of grief and the uneven path toward healing.
• The Passage of Time: Time is fluid in After Life, both structurally and thematically. Amber exists out of sync with the present, a living echo of the past. This distortion of time allows Forman to explore how people change or remain tethered to pivotal moments, how the future can feel like a betrayal to the memory of what was lost, and how the past constantly bleeds into the present.
• Identity and Memory: Amber’s struggle to reclaim her identity after death is one of the novel’s most compelling threads. Without physical proof of her existence or the sensory experiences of being alive, she questions who she is now. This theme extends to her family, particularly Missy and Calvin, who have reshaped their own identities around the absence Amber left behind.
• Love in Its Many Forms: From romantic to familial to self-love, the novel depicts love as both an anchor and a burden. Amber’s love for Calvin, Missy’s fierce sisterly loyalty, and Brian’s spiritual devotion all contrast with Gloria’s inability to process love’s loss. Love here is never simple – it is tangled, painful, and beautiful in its persistence.
• The Supernatural and the Miraculous: Amber’s return is never explained by science or religion – it is accepted as a miracle. The ambiguity around how or why she came back allows the novel to explore belief systems, from Catholicism to atheism to the unexplainable forces that govern existence. This tension between the supernatural and the rational underscores the mystery of life and death.

Writing Style and Tone

Gayle Forman’s writing in After Life is intimate, lyrical, and emotionally resonant. She employs a multi-perspective narrative, with chapters rotating between Amber and key figures from her life, each imbued with its own distinct voice and emotional timbre. The prose is rich with sensory detail, though Amber’s inability to feel or smell upon her return adds a unique twist, transforming everyday observations into haunting absences. Forman’s command of internal monologue and emotional beats renders each character’s pain palpable, elevating what could have been a simple ghost story into a layered psychological and emotional tapestry.

The tone of the novel is tender, melancholic, and at times, darkly whimsical. There are moments of biting humor and adolescent snark, particularly in Amber’s narration, that give the story levity and realism. These lighter tones are counterbalanced by the heavy emotional weight of grief, regret, and disorientation. The contrast between warmth and cold – literal and metaphorical – runs throughout the novel, mirroring Amber’s strange state of limbo. The overall tone is one of aching beauty, as the narrative dances between life and death, memory and oblivion, loss and rediscovery.