Eighty-Nine Questions for After

Eighty-Nine Questions for After by Ashleigh Barton (Hachette Australia) PB RRP $16.99 ISBN 9780733654596

This is a wise and beautifully written middle-grade novel about finding answers to life's big questions, by popular children's author Ashleigh Barton.

Ester Star is a germophobe and hypochondriac, and she's convinced she's going to die. To prepare for her imminent and inevitable demise, Ester keeps a list of all the questions she hopes to have answered in the afterlife - things she knows she'll never have the answers to during her lifetime. What really happened to the dinosaurs? Just how big is the universe? Are ghosts real? She's up to eighty-nine questions and counting.

When Ester's usual after-school sitters announce they are moving away, her mum comes up with an alternative arrangement that turns her world upside down. Every day after school, Ester spends her afternoons with Mum at work. At a hospice. Terrified of all the things she might catch at a hospice, Ester is anxious every second she's there.

But soon she meets Joan, an elderly lady who used to be in the circus. Joan tells Ester she doesn't believe in the afterlife, but she does have one question she'll regret never having answered while she's alive. Why did her sister disappear all those years ago, after they had been so close growing up in the circus together?

With the help of Peter, another kid who spends his afternoons at the hospice, and her new next-door neighbour, a tech whizz named Mackenzie, Ester sets out to have Joan's question answered.

Will Ester realise there's more to life than worrying about dying?