A tremendous thank you to NetGalley and Bantam Books for my advanced reader copy of Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson! This is Holly Jackson’s adult debut novel, so you may remember her from The Reappearance of Rachel Price or A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.

The Story

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder—now a hit Netflix series—returns with her first novel for adults: a twisty thriller about a young woman trying to solve her own murder.

In seven days Jet Mason will be dead.

Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. I’ll do it later, she always says. She has time.

Until Halloween night, when Jet is violently attacked by an unseen intruder.

She suffers a catastrophic head injury. The doctor is certain that within a week, the injury will trigger a deadly aneurysm.

Jet has never thought of herself as having enemies. But now she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend.

She has at most seven days, and as her condition deteriorates she has only her childhood friend Billy for help. But nevertheless, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something:

Jet is going to solve her own murder.

My Thoughts

In short, I loved this book.

Not Quite Dead Yet hit you with action straight out the gate. I was immediately engaged, and it stayed that way until the end. It was fast-paced, full of twists and turns, and the end had me ugly crying. Seriously, anything you could want in a book.

Keep in mind that this is a young woman at the end of her life investigating her own murder. She overlaps a wee bit with the police investigation, but it should not be considered any sort of police procedural.

I was reading some Instagram comments and reviews, and there were quite a few harping on what a “good representation of PKD” this book was. If you haven’t yet read it, PKD is polycystic kidney disease. I am not of the population that would believe this representation is important in a book, so take this next bit with a grain of salt. I don’t think it was a good representation of PKD. It was mentioned a few times, and the importance of medicine was in there, but it wasn’t any sort of key piece of the book.

Well, it was, but I hope you understand what I mean here. I’m clearly rambling at this point.

Now, I’ll add a caveat into this. Not Quite Dead Yet is Holly Jackson’s adult debut, but I don’t know that she she writes like an adult author. That’s a weird sentence. She’s obviously an adult, but this didn’t read like adult fiction. It read like a YA novel, just with a main character in her 20s.

I’m looking back at the content of this review so far, and it makes it sound like I didn’t like it. I promise I did! I think I just want to ensure you understand that it isn’t any sort of classic or groundbreaking book. It’s just a book that I thoroughly enjoyed and think a lot of other people would too.

Unrelated to the content of this book, I just saw that Holly Jackson was also born in 1992 (the same year I was born). I feel decidedly untalented and behind with the fact that she has published MANY amazing books, and I have done nothing…

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