Wednesday, November 16, 2016

#FRC2016: The Next by Stephanie Gangi



This fall, members of the Vise Library are going back to school by participating in a Fall Reading Challenge (it's our Junior Year!)  We have received copies of several books from publishers for honest reviews. We hope that you enjoy these reviews (and books)!




Course Title: Ghost Stories 101
Department: Paranormal Studies
About the book:

Is there a right way to die? If so, Joanna DeAngelis has it all wrong. She’s consumed by betrayal, spending her numbered days obsessing over Ned McGowan, her much younger ex, and watching him thrive in the spotlight with someone new, while she wastes away. She’s every woman scorned, fantasizing about revenge … except she’s out of time.
Joanna falls from her life, from the love of her daughters and devoted dog, into an otherworldly landscape, a bleak infinity she can’t escape until she rises up and returns and sets it right―makes Ned pay―so she can truly move on.
From the other side into right this minute, Jo embarks on a sexy, spiritual odyssey. As she travels beyond memory, beyond desire, she is transformed into a fierce female force of life, determined to know how to die, happily ever after.
In The Next, Joanna is near the end of her life due to a hard fight with breast cancer.  Her daughters and her dog are by her side until the very end.  As her life comes to a close, she thinks back on her long lost love Ned.  Ned disappeared from her life without a word one day on his way to pick up groceries and Joanna finds out that Ned left her for a younger woman (and the younger woman is carrying his child)!  After Joanna passes away she becomes a ghost (instead of heading toward that shiny bright light).  She's not just any ghost though; she is a ghost hellbent on revenge against Ned.  She haunts Ned and makes his life miserable!  The torment that Ned receives from Joanna makes him feel like he is losing his mind, and I guess that is Joanna's point.

I enjoyed every bit of this book and I loved Joanna's dog Tom.  He may have been my favorite character from the book.  This is a very unique and quirky story and really gives new meaning to "hell hath no fury..."

Find it: Amazon Barnes & Noble |







About the author:


Stephanie Gangi lives and works in New York City. She is a lifelong New Yorker, born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, a graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo, and raised her own kids in Tribeca, Rockland County and on the Upper West Side.

Gangi’s first publishing credit, many years ago, was a children’s book, Lumpy: A Baseball Fable, co-written with pitching great (and New York Met) Tug McGraw. She ghostwrote a tell-all about Liberace in 1984 but left the only copy in a taxicab. She has written jacket copy, pitch letters, business plans, speeches, mortgage checks, absence excuse notes, letters to editors, hundreds of poems, dozens of story starts, dating profiles, countless email, texts, sexts and random tweets. She once chalked a love note on the wall of a Paris alley in the rain.

She is an award-winning poet at work on a chapbook, and her second novel.

Connect with the author:

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