Teachers' Version of Parley After Life

Teachers' Version includes an extra 32 pages or 20,000 words of explanatory cross-referenced notes on the homonyms, idioms, double meanings and paraphrases as well as additional literary bibliographic references. Author's comments on the human condition that has led to widespread belief in religions and the afterlife are also expounded upon but, more importantly, there are psychological self-help insights into how best to work through the grieving process.

Lesson Notes are written following relevant paragraphs. Please be aware that the flexible nature of ePub page formatting means that page numbers may not correspond between a teacher's and student's version or between different students' ePub readers. Section numbers are provided for class navigation through each chapter. Both the Teachers' and Students' versions contain the novel in two formats: with footnotes and section numbers and an easy reading version without notes.

Review of Parley After Life:

"Because he died before his time, the teen protagonist of this wildly imaginative fantasy/sci-fi novel ends up in the special part of the afterlife reserved for lost things. He is meant to wait there until his proper time to die. Wit, as he is called in the afterlife, finds himself sharing this peculiar sort of purgatory with all manner of lost things—not just children. Buttons, socks, religion ("people are losing their religion all the time, right?") and more turn up there as well. Wit, however, is unwilling to accept that he is dead and immediately sets about trying to find a way back to his life. His adventures along the way make for an unusual picaresque fantasy that is at times sweetly amusing and at other times deeply disturbing. This book seemed to me like The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy meets Dante. If that combo makes you faintly queasy, well, don't say I didn't tell you.

As you might expect from Wit's name, the book is filled with puns and wordplay, and twisty little jokes with bits that I almost missed, sometimes getting the pun or punch line a half step behind the beat. These aren't just one-off jokes; the wordplay is often extended, setting up an entire section or theme.

This e-book includes frequent links to websites that explain or elaborate on scientific points that come up in the book. For example, you can pop over directly from the text to a website about termites to find out the facts behind the Term-Mights. In one place, readers are directed to a Wikipedia site giving statistics on teen pregnancy, in another, to an academic paper on the biology of eunuchs. The story is wildly fantastical, yet these links provide frequent reminders of the real, hard-core world of modern science, as if to reassure the reader that stories of an afterlife are only imaginative means of coping with grief, lest the reader mistake them for some kind of reality. Joan Didion wrote that "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Miller is telling himself, and us, stories to help us deal with death. As Wit eventually comes to accept and understand his death, the reader comes to accept the deaths of us all."
Ref. Self-Publishing Review