Paranormal Romance
Date Published: September 15, 2015
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.
REVIEW
Fun, Sarcasm, Death … not in that order
Gracie Daniels wakes up naked on a
table with a tag around her toe. Yup, she’s been pronounced dead and is seconds
away from having an autopsy performed to determine why. We’ve all been there …
or not. But then we didn’t have Terra, a member of a Wiccan coven, practicing reanimation
spells. While the shock of what’s happened to her is unsettling, so is finding
your boyfriend is already hooking up with a study buddy from geology. But when
one door closes, another one opens and you find a hunk named Troy Scott.
Unfortunately, you also find out that if you don’t do something, you’ll start
to decay ... unless you find that freaking book on alchemy.
This is the premise of Sofia Diana
Gabel’s GRACIE, DEAD OR ALIVE. It’s part mystery, part paranormal, and part satire.
Is satire a genre? It should be. It’s also a pretty good read. I liked Ms.
Gabel’s style of spinning a tale and appreciated the imaginative twists and
turns the story took. It kept me interested and laughing which are the two
things I most like to be outside of caffeinated, but a book can only do so
much.
I liked Grace Daniels and watching her
try to find a solution to her predicament. And, of course, she makes all the
wrong moves! How many people here have been dead before? A show of hands,
please? I thought not. I would hazard a guess and say that it’s pretty
disconcerting and would probably throw anyone off their game, so I forgave her.
The story is fast-paced and moves along
at quite the clip. It’s not predictable and that’s always a plus. It’s
well-written and also humorous. If those sound like things you enjoy, then I
suggest you dive on in and give GRACIE, DEAD OR ALIVE a try! I’m giving this a
3.8.
AUTHOR BIO
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.
Contact Information
Twitter: @sofiadianagabel
Purchase Links
