Review: Gracie, Dead or Alive
by Sofia Diana Gabel
Paranormal Romance
A story of the living, the undead, magic,
betrayal, love, more betrayal, and blueberry pancakes. Gracie Daniels has it
all. She’s young, pretty, in love and about to graduate from the University of
Southern California, but her world is turned upside down when she wakes up,
dead, in the morgue. But that’s only the beginning of Gracie’s new undead life.
She has to learn to survive impending decomposition from a Wiccan spell that
went wrong and numerous betrayals, all while searching for a mysterious
alchemical spell book. Then along comes handsome Troy Scott. How can Gracie
balance being dead and falling in love? It would be easier to give up, but
that’s not Gracie.
Excerpt:
Why was I in the morgue? I struggled to sit
up and quickly realized I was naked. Buck naked, not a stitch on. I blinked and
saw the origin of the voice, a petite young woman wearing an open white lab
coat and blue scrubs. Her nametag said Sarah.
She yelped and clamped a hand over her
mouth. “I can’t believe it. Talk again.”
Okay. “Hi. What am I doing here?” My
voice was stronger now, and I didn’t feel quite as cold.
Sarah giggled like a high school girl. “I’m
Terra.”
“Nametag says Sarah.” I grabbed the sheet
that had bunched around my waist when I sat up and pulled it up to my chin.
“That’s a vanilla name. My coven name is
Terra. And you’re Gracie. Nice to meet you face-to-face, Gracie.” She smiled a
broad, look-what-I-did smile.Two other bodies lay on tables, their feet poking
out, each with a toe tag dangling in the air. That made me think. I pulled up
the sheet to expose my own feet. What the hell! I had a toe tag as well.
“Sarah, I mean Terra, what’s going on?” I
brought my foot up and slipped the tag off.
Terra was still smiling. “You, um, you...I
did something.” She shoved a piece of paper into her pocket.
“Why am I here, in the morgue?” I wrapped
the sheet around me like a toga and swung my legs over the side of the table,
dangling them over the sterile white tile floor. There were strange little
glass jars around my table.
“Oh, that’s easy. You’re dead.”
“No, I’m not. I’m sitting here in a morgue
talking to you.”
“Yeah, you are dead. You’ve been dead for six hours. I couldn’t wait much
longer because they might start the autopsy. I had to get to you before it
happened, obviously.” Terra clapped her hands together. “So, what do you feel
like? Are you breathing? Do you feel like yourself, you know, before you died?
What’s it like to be not dead anymore?”
“What?” It was hard to concentrate on
Terra’s endless questions.
She pulled out a little compact mirror from
her pocket, along with the piece of paper she’d just put in there, and held the
mirror near my lips. “Can you breathe? Are your lungs working? The mirror isn’t
fogging up. How are you not breathing? This is so cool. Oh my God! What’s it
like?”
I shoved her hand away, making her drop the
mirror. It shattered. “Can you shut up for a minute? I need to think.” Her
voice was like an icepick stabbing my brain. The piece of paper was clutched in
her other hand, and I wanted it. While she looked at the ground, I grabbed the
paper and saw what looked like a couple of recipes and…an incantation?
“That’s mine. And you broke my mirror.”
Terra pointed to the shards. “Damn it! I don’t need bad luck.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
She pouted. “You can keep the spell, I
don’t need it anymore. Hey, I’d better run. Nice to meet you.”
“Wait!” I reached out and held her by the
sleeve and waved the paper in the air. “You’re not leaving me here. Is this an
incantation? What’s going on? Where are my parents and Raf? Are you a doctor?”
She didn’t look, or act, like a doctor. She
was maybe in her early twenties, like me, but unlike me, her hair was platinum
blonde with pink highlights. Heavy black kohl outlined her eyes, she had her
eyebrow pierced and had two cheek dimple-piercings. Doctors didn’t look like
that, did they? She looked like a groupie at a boy band concert. I hated
groupies.
She giggled. “No, I’m not a doctor. I got a
job here as a tech so I could be near the bodies when they came downstairs.”
She tugged her arm free, bent down and picked up several of the open jars that
now I could see were filled with dried plants floating in liquid; the herbs I’d
smelled. “I’m kind of a Wiccan alchemist. I made up the name. But don’t tell my
coven what I did! They’ll excommunicate me or whatever for practicing without a
license.”
“Practicing? Practicing what, exactly?” I
lifted the sheet away from my body just enough to check myself out. I didn’t
have any cuts or wounds. Was this a joke? Raf had tried to prank me once, by
swapping my guacamole with wasabi, but I managed to subvert it by switching it
back when he wasn’t looking. He knew how much I hated wasabi and in fact,
anything spicy. But this time it looked like he got me.
My Review:
I received a free
copy of the book from the author for my honest opinion.
Terra is a young
witch who is just learning how to use her magic. She is not supposed to use her
magic without the permission or maybe without her coven's knowledge of her
doing so. But Terra doesn't listen or play by the rules. She finds a very old
book with a spell in it to bring the dead back to life. She knows that using
the spell is very taboo and goes against all of her coven's rules but Terra
can't do as she is told. She can't stand it she just has to see if the spell
will work. She probably just wants to know if she can bring someone back to
life all by herself. When she uses the spell she is so full of happiness that I
can just see her dancing around and jumping up and down. Terra is a young
novice/witch that doesn't really have clue as to what she is doing. Rules are
put into place for a reason and that is why some rules can't or shouldn't be
broken. But Terra is young and is like any other teen that thinks she can doing
anything. She is a good girl and never wants to hurt anyone. She only wants to
help and do what is right but sometimes we do things without thinking it
through.
Gracie is happy to
be alive or undead but she is a little upset with Terra for just walking out
and leaving her all alone knowing she doesn't know what to do as a zombie or
undead person that is. Gracie leaves the morgue and goes home to do some
research online to see if she can find anything or one that can help her with
being dead or undead. Like does she need to eat, sleep or what. She gets lucky
and finds another witch; Araceli that tries to help Gracie as much as she can.
She uses her contacts in the witch world to help Gracie find the answers she
needs. But as we know there people out there that we can't trust and just want
to use us for their own selfish reasons.
Gracie meets a cop
while she is out trying to make money the only way she can think of at the
time. She finds out that it doesn't matter if you are dead or alive that you
still need money to survive and while she is out trying to make money by using
a method to make some fast cash that has been around for a long time she meets
a cop who just happens to be a hottie and just happens to have a big heart like
Gracie's who likes to help people. Troy "the cop" gives Gracie his
phone number and tells her to call him anytime if she needs him. Oh and let me
tell you use it she does.
Troy may be a hottie
and a cop, he is a good cop who likes go by all the rules and not break any
laws but when his heart starts fluttering for little old Gracie he comes real
close to breaking some of those rules to help her find who or what it is she
needs to make her undead life better.
Someone has taken
something from Gracie that she needs to make her undead life better. All of her
new friends are trying to help Gracie in any way they can to get that something
back. Gracie is so happy that she has found people that care enough for her to
help her with her undead situation. Gracie and all of her new friends are
forming lasting relationships.
I am so very glad
that Gracie has found all of these people to help her out and especially Troy.
She deserves to have someone like him in her life after finding out what kind
of person the guy who was her boyfriend when she was still alive was and the
things he did not only to her but to others as well.
Well I have really
liked following Gracie, Troy, Terra, Araceli and all of the other characters on
their journeys. Oh man and what a journey it has been. Witches, zombies/undead
and everything they have been through it just out of this world. I can't wait
to read more about Gracie and all of her new friends.
About the Author:
Sofia Diana Gabel is a multi-genre fiction
writer who was born in Sydney, Australia, but is now living in the United
States with her family. With degrees in environmental science and archaeology,
she enjoys being out in nature when she's not glued to her desk writing or researching
a new story idea. Writing is a true passion of hers, born from a love of the
written word that can transport the reader to different places or worlds and
deliver them back to reality, safe and sound.
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