For Fans of If I Stay and You’ve Reached Sam, a New YA Novel in Verse Takes on the Afterlife — Read an Excerpt! (Exclusive)

Amber McBride is at it again.

The National Book Award finalist’s new novel, The Leaving Room, takes a different look at the afterlife, in which there’s no heaven or hell, no focus on redemption or punishment and absolutely no ghosts. Instead, “the novel is 100% set in the immediate otherworld just after death, through which children must phase,” according to the book’s official synopsis.

The Leaving Room follows the empathetic Gospel, the Keeper of The Leaving Room where all young people arrive when they die. Her task is to gently usher the children’s wispy souls along on their journey. But when a Keeper named Melodee arrives, their souls become entwined. Gospel and Melodee must find a way out of The Leaving Room and learn how to be unafraid of their love, as Gospel learns more about who she really is and why her surroundings aren’t behaving the way she expects.

The book “explores connection, memory and hope in ways that are unforgettable and poignant,” the synopsis promises.

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Below, read an exclusive excerpt from The Leaving Room.

My (Gospel’s) Leaving Room 

Rule 2: Only 1 Leaver & 1 Keeper in a  Leaving Room at the same time. 

The room I keep is small. Some might call it a closet that you can’t escape — square with sky-high ceilings, warmed by a hearth I whisper into each night. Framed paintings & sketches line the walls & a green-as-grass kitchen hugs the back wall ’cause those not ready to leave still think they need to eat. 

You’d think that if you wanted someone to leave, you’d make the cushions sink. Make the food cold & bland. Craft the room dark & give the paintings off-putting smiles. Perhaps other Keepers do this, frighten Leavers into fleeing, but only children come to my Leaving Room . . . 

& children require dessert, moonsets & warm blankets. 

I don’t know what happens in other rooms 

because there can only be one Leaver & one Keeper at one time in a Leaving Room. 

This is one rule I have never broken.

So, I keep a kettle hot. I collect recipes. I flood the cot in the corner (where some Leavers pretend to sleep) with quilted blankets. My chair (that rocks on half-moons) is stationed at the enormous stump named Methuselah. 

I know the stump is wounded (I don’t know why). Changeful bruises cycle through it, from bluish  

yellow to purplish green. 

Then they heal & rewind & it starts again. 

It is as if it has been struck by some mythical axe. Methuselah marks the center of the Leaving Room, a wooden compass pointing everywhere 

& nowhere. 

A mancala board is carved into the  

ancient veins of the stump. 

A tattoo of chance with playing pieces 

that have been known to morph on their own accord. 

There’s an alchemy to being a Keeper, because I also must keep the tears from running too hard, prevent shouts from spilling through the seams like a stream. I must charm the ceiling to blink with stars & convince the paintings to offer reassuring nods. 

There are rules in death. 

You can’t go back, so, even though there are hundreds  of paintings 

of everywhere places—

there are 

no 

doors.

Courtesy of Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group.

The Leaving Room hits shelves on Oct. 14 and is available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.