The Light of Supremazia ((after)life lessons Book 1) – Alana (Siegel) Mag
Synpsis
An outcast teen. A supernatural academy. An evil spirit that wants revenge.
Jules Winklevoss attends a high school taught by the most brilliant minds in history. Imagine if Albert Einstein was your science teacher and John F. Kennedy was your social studies teacher…as if surviving high school wasn’t hard enough! Jules can handle bullies and homework, but an academy run by spirits? She may be dead meat. Jules is determined to protect her family and keep herself alive, even if that means delving into the world of the dead.
The Light of Supremazia is the first installment in a YA fantasy series. If you like hidden worlds, fast-paced adventures, and teenage angst, then you’ll love Alana Mag’s series starter. Join the adventure today!
Review
Jules is a 14-year-old girl who spends all her time with her best friend Johnny, and her 13-year-old sister, Meggy.
After Johnny’s death in strange accident, things get even worse for Jules as she discovers that her entire life is a lie. She is actually “adopted” and now her biological family demands that she attend an academy for people with “special abilities.”
This way Jules learns that she is capable of seeing ghosts, a necessary skill to enter the Vita Post Mortem Academy, especially since many of the teachers, and even students, are, in fact, ghosts.
Things get complicated when Jules discovers that her family is the target of the revenge of Machiavelli, an evil spirit who recruits followers in the best style of Death Eaters, after Jules’s grandmother ruins his plans to form an immortal army.
At least now that she knows she can see ghosts, she understands that she hasn’t lost Johnny forever, but why doesn’t he show up?
Vita Post Mortem Academy is basically Hogwarts but with ghosts… But at Hogwarts there were also ghosts so… Like Hogwarts but without magic.
The detail that the professors are people like Einstein, John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe is really fascinating and funny, however, it is horrible to imagine that all the ghosts continue to look like they did at the time of their death, even if that implies very beautiful wounds…
It really reminded me a lot of Hogwarts, for example, there are also “houses” here, but there are 3. Corpus, the pure-muscle blues, Mentis, the intelligent-egotistical grays and Viscus, the reds… normal ?. It really is the first time that I would have liked to be in the “house” of the “losers”.
Jules befriends Dahlia, a very intelligent but shy girl, and Logan, a mudblo… sorry, a Charity boy, whose parents are not from a long line of visioners, they are Mugg… I mean ableptic (blind to ghosts). She also becomes a frenemy of Sharpée, a very interesting character to say the least, and of Chase, the unbearable younger brother of Ryder, who was in charge of taking Jules to the academy and basically left her drooling over him ?.
Together they must simply survive school, until Jules realizes that Johnny’s “accident” was indeed directed at her, plus the fact that Johnny started talking to everyone around her except her, and the fact that she knew Machiavelli was getting closer and closer. This is basically the perfect recipe for disaster… making it the perfect recipe for a good story.
The more I think about it, the more I doubt how to rate this story. I enjoyed it very much and could not stop reading it, but I feel that there are things that do not convince me. For example, Meggy is 13 years old and while Jules mentioned that it has always been like the difference was more, there really are times when it seems that Meggy is 6 years old. This does not affect the story in any case though.
There are also a couple of things that left me somewhat confused, but since it is the beginning of a saga, this does not complicate me too much.
Anyway, for me this is a highly recommended and fast-reading book. Although it might not be a good idea for overly sensitive people, especially going through descriptions of injuries or deaths.
I forgot to mention that I listened to the audiobook of this story. It was harder for me to understand it than other audiobooks I’ve heard, but I quite liked the narrator anyway. However, I still laugh a lot when they try to make voices. In this particular case, the narrator is a man with a deep voice, and Meggy’s voice is “soft.” You really get used to it fast, but it always makes me laugh when I start an audiobook.
PS: A detail that is not very relevant but that I cannot get out of my head is that the girl on the cover is too blonde for me to be Jules, and yes, it is irrelevant, but it bothers me ?.
Bye bye ?