S.C.Y.T.H.E. – Secure Collection, Yielding, Transport, and Handling of Essences – is the company at the center of this story.
Nora Bird is terrified of death. Her parents died in an accident when she was just six years old, so she is obsessed with avoiding risk. Some would even say she is overly cautious. But still, she has a job with S.C.Y.T.H.E., the company that employs grim reapers.
Nora Bird, as part of her job with S.C.Y.T.H.E., sees notices of who is to die, when they are to die, and how they are to die. She is a twin, but she hardly ever talks to her twin brother, Charlie. On their birthday, she is thinking about him when she sees a new notice of death; this one is for Charlie. She hasn’t even spoken to him for six months, but he is all she has left. Nora is determined to save him from certain death, but every time she does, a new cause of his death pops up.
Nora, on the run from death with Charlie and her job, is bound and determined to cheat death out of Charlie’s soul. They go to the town their mother and father were from, a town way off the beaten path to see what they can discover about their parents. What they discovrer is a lot more than they bargained for.
The big question though is whether or not Nora succeeds is keeping her brother alive.
At first, I really wondered why I wanted to read this book so badly. My husband died just a few months ago and reading about death was the last thing I wanted to do. But to my amazement, I really enjoyed this book. It was serious yet it was humorous at the same time. I will have to get the first book in this series and read it now.
I don’t believe there are grim reapers wondering around the earth collecting souls, but this was something I actually needed to read to make me feel better. Nora’s fear of death , her being so overly cautious about anything and everything she put into her body, being so careful about everything she did, well, that was hilarious. Thank you to the author for writing such a fabulous book and for making the story believable.
I highly recommend this book to everyone. That is how much I enjoyed it. If you would like to own your own copy of this great book, I’ve provided an Amazon link for you below.
Amazon Links:
A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Cheating Death
A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer
Favorite Sentences
Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to die on your birthday than any other day of the year.
And they were so deep in the middle of nowhere that even the not-quite-explainable abilities of S.C.Y.T.H.E. would likely be stymied in tracking them down here.
At the rate they were going, they could be lost out here forever, dead by starvation, dehydration, bitten to death by the cold.
She might be a Bird, but she was built mostly of multivitamins and anxiety.
She shuffled her feet like a penguin with a full bladder, desperate not to slip and break her neck.
New Words Learned
insular – isolated
About the Author
Maxie Dara is from a tiny, Hallmark movie-style town in Ontario, Canada where she works as a writer and actress, because rejection-heavy careers are her passion. She is also a two- time award- winning playwright. Maxie knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of seven, when she first fell in love with the written word. She also wanted to be a mermaid but has mostly focused on the writing side of things.
