Was intrigued by the book plot. The format though interesting and laid out as a "play" was quite distracting. with stage direction and dialogue it took me out of the book. Fun creative plot, just execution was a little off.

When Lacy wakes up dead in Westminster Cemetery, final resting place of Edgar Allan Poe, she's confused. It's the job of Sam, a young soldier who died in 1865, to teach her the rules of the afterlife and to warn her about Suppression--a punishment worse than death.

Lacy desperately wants to leave the cemetery and find out how she died, but every soul is obligated to perform a job. Given the task of providing entertainment, Lacy proposes an open mic, which becomes a chance for the cemetery's residents to express themselves. But Lacy is in for another shock when surprising and long-buried truths begin to emerge.

All I have to say is who knew the dead were so emotional! The afterlife in this book is full of self doubt, cowardice, vindictiveness, sadness, anger, love, you name it they feel it! Lacy is a "modern" buried in an old cemetery full of really old souls. She is the first to join their ranks since 1913. Her appearance is seen as a threat by the rule enforcer Mrs. Steele who follows Lacy looking for any reason to grant her three strikes so Lacy can be suppressed. Until Lacy woke up dead, everything in the cemetery ran on a boring routine. Mrs. Steele's assumptions about the newcomer are correct but will she be able to stop the progressive momentum or be able to silence her forever? Oh my how I loved this book!

Open Mic Night at Westminster Cemetery by Mary Amato is a YA paranormal fantasy story told in the format of a two-act stage play. If you like a good ghost story, you're going to have to try this tale because there is so much to like about it. It's a darkly humorous and quirky, features a fantastic variety of characters (including Edgar Allan Poe himself), and it asks intriguing questions about life and death. It did leave me wanting a little more, especially about the wider ghostly world though as this is set entirely in one cemetery. The story is very visual and could be fun to actually see as a stage play (or a movie), but I think I would have preferred this to be in regular novel format. I didn't know it wasn't a regular novel before I started reading actually. Personally, I think I was expecting a little bit more Beetlejuice, but overall it would certainly fit in with Tim Burton's oeuvre.

I really enjoyed the dry tone of Open Mic Night at Westminster Cemetery. The premise was fun, the characters were well-defined, and the mystery was intriguing. In particular, I enjoyed the use of dramatic conventions to tell the story. Though I found my interest waning in the middle, the entire book is unique enough to warrant notice.

Mixed feelings here. This is one of those YA books that reminds me that I'm not the target audience, but that's okay.

The title reeled me in, and I really enjoyed the concept - modern girl wakes up dead in a cemetery filled with the long-deceased and must learn how to adapt herself to the new rules governing her existence. As she pushes back against the ancient rules, she winds up changing "life" for everyone in the cemetery. I found the script format and the authorial asides a little off-putting at first, but I got into the swing of things eventually. The part that threw me was the fact that Lacy was dead and how much her death affected her grieving sister and mother - too stressful for me as a grownup! Lots of kids in my library will love it, though.

This is an excellent book! Written in the form of a two act play, it begins with sixteen year old Lacy awakening, as it were, dead, in a the cemetery where Edgar Allen Poe is buried. Prior to her arrival, the last resident arrived in 1913, so Lacy is seen as a "modern", by the other residents who include Sam, who died during the civil war, Poe's wife Virginia, two sisters who do needlework, and Sam's overly controlling mother, Mrs. Steele, who rules the cemetery and has the disorderly dead "suppressed". Lacy doesn't know she is dead and doesn't remember dying. Her last memory is of being on the way to participate in an open mic night to perform her poetry. Throughout the story we get to know the various dead and they work through their troubles from the past, and present. I would love to see this performed as a play! I think it would be very entertaining. It has humor and sadness and seems original and fun.

I don’t want to come right out and say that the title is the best part of the whole book. It wasn’t really a bad enough book for me to justify saying that. But the title is pretty damn awesome, and was basically 98% of the reason I requested this ARC. Sadly the actual book struggled somewhat to live up to it.

Westminster Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland, is the final resting place of one Edgar Allan Poe, his wife, mother-in-law, and a few hundred other people. Nobody new has been buried in centuries – until Lacy Brink wakes up there and discovers she’s been cremated at the tender age of sixteen, having died on her way to an open mic night.

It turns out that ghosts have a surprising number (261, to be exact) of rules: no swearing, no yelling, no intimate contact, no being in another person’s grave, etc etc. Breaking any of these rules thrice results in Suppression – meaning you can’t ever rise from your grave again and have to stay lying underground, forbidden even the few hours of above-ground time permitted to ghosts at midnight.

(Incidentally, I read some of this book while on a trip to Paris. Visiting the catacombs helped me gain a newfound sympathy for the Suppressed and how horrible being squeezed into a tiny underground space must be.)

Anyway! Lacy, being a modern girl dumped into a cemetery of Victorians, quickly runs afoul of the Rules. While she makes a couple of friends, including a sensitive Civil War veteran named Sam, the strict Mrs Steele who oversees the cemetery is determined to see Lacy Suppressed. Our intrepid heroine proceeds to navigate through friendships and romance in the afterlife while also dealing with the question of how she died and the effect this has had on her grieving family. It all culminates in – you guessed it – the decision to hold an open mic night at Westminster Cemetery, attended by none other than its resident celebrity, Mr Poe.

So far, so good. But… then the book majorly breaks down.

This book had the biggest and most shameless case of insta-love I’ve ever seen. Sam, a tortured soul who’s spent the two hundred years since his death trying to write poetry, falls in love with Lacy at first sight – literally because she’s the first teenage girl he’s seen in all that time. The crowning touch that cements his love is the deep and meaningful fact that… they both write poetry. It was clearly meant to be.

- 'The gaze from Lacy is like a drink of ambrosia' -

The above thought on Sam’s part occurs precisely 12% in. True and undying (sorry) love is being declared two pages later. What makes this even more painful is the fact that when it wasn’t trying to be romantic, the book’s discussion of character/family dynamics and the backstories of the ghosts was actually pretty good. The attempt to have a romantic element was just an unnecessary distraction.

The other ghosts were pretty well-fleshed-out, no complaints there. I wasn’t a huge fan of Virginia Poe being characterised as the bitchy mean girl, but a lot of time is lavished on her backstory so it seems more understandable. She’s no 2D villain. In fact, nobody is; not even Mrs Steele. Poe fell a bit flat for me, perhaps because I like to picture him as wilder, more insane, yet Amato dispelled a lot of the unearthly allure he’s picked up from poems like Annabel Lee. He also has very few appearances – don’t read this book hoping for a Poe homage. It’s not.

The format was pretty interesting. It’s written as a play, with frequent authorial interjections on such matters as staging and acting with live/dead audiences. Unfortunately, the first half of the book suffered a fair bit from the showing, not telling problem. Exhibit A:

- 'She’s guarded, but vulnerable at the same time.' -

That’s quite an amazing insight from Sam, considering he’d met Lacy all of ten seconds ago when he has this Sherlockian view into her psyche. Lacy also has this problem: she makes incredible character deductions instantaneously upon meeting them (e.g. ‘Cumberland, you’re a coward!’), deductions I’d probably hesitate to make after months of knowing someone, let alone seconds. This issue did get significantly better as the book progressed though.

SUMMARY: Good characters, terrible attempt at romance, shortage of Poe.

I enjoyed this book more in theory than in practice. It's a wonderful idea that does not work for me. Creative idea and the characters are perfectly likeable but there was just something that did not work for me.

Description:
When Lacy wakes up dead in Westminster Cemetery, final resting place of Edgar Allan Poe, she's confused. It's the job of Sam, a young soldier who died in 1865, to teach her the rules of the afterlife and to warn her about Suppression—a punishment worse than death.

Lacy desperately wants to leave the cemetery and find out how she died, but every soul is obligated to perform a job. Given the task of providing entertainment, Lacy proposes an open mic, which becomes a chance for the cemetery's residents to express themselves. But Lacy is in for another shock when surprising and long-buried truths begin to emerge.

My Thoughts:
According to the "Dear Reader" letter at the beginning, this is based on a true story and was originally written for the Deceased and performed first at Westminster Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland. Most of the characters are Deceased and indeed if this play is performed in other cemeteries across the country, it will be quite the novel entertainment.

The scene opens in front of Edgar Allen Poe's cemetery as Sam Steele, want to be poet and romantic struggles to find his muse. When the Raven announces the name of new resident Lacy Brink, the chaos begins, after all she is the first new dead person in over 100 years.

This is about love and sorrow, friendship and rules. This is about people who are afraid, stuck and just sleeping through eternity. And this is about one girl who brings hope.

Do readers have to be familiar with the works of Poe in order to read this? No. Except for his Raven who acts as both semi-narrator and sentry, readers do not need to read Poe.

Instead, the main characters, Sam and Lacy, will appeal to the bookworm, the silent poets, the readers with their own hidden lives. Sam and Lacy will be familiar friends.

A Few Words:
Perched on Poe's monument, the bird looks directly at us, black eyes glittering. He opens his beak as if to finally give us the truth, to tell us what it all means, to tell us what that vastness of infinity holds for our characters and holds for us, and then a look -- a mixture of humor, pity, and love -- flashes from his eyes and he closes his beak. That thing gathering inside our chests --hope--snags against the prickle of comprehension. --Scene 10: The Amen

This was a phenomenal book that I would re-read and share a physical copy with others. For lovers of literature, the macabre, and a sense of theatrics, this tale is unique and makes you ponder the idea of an alternate afterlife, where the dead form a community and help one another cope with grief and celebrate life. Initially, the play format was tricky to get into, but I immensely enjoyed the narrator’s asides.

I’m on the fence about this book.

On the one hand, it’s charming. The main characters are likable and it’s easy to get engaged in the story. It’s creative and different than anything else I’ve read lately. Those are all pluses and make the story, overall, a very enjoyable read.

Some of my complaints are tricky because they’re also what I liked about the book. What I mean is, poetry and song lyrics are a large part of the book. They provide character development and are necessary for the open mic night section. They’re quirky and fun and create an atmosphere for the book. The idea itself is awesome: spirits that reside in a cemetery put on an open mic night where they learn about each other! Very cute. At the same time, the lyrics and poems are awful. They’re very predictable and trite. Full of cliched, overly sentimental easy rhymes. They were very, very cringe to read and during the open mic night when there were just pages of them, it was painful.

Then there’s the ending, which is basically Lost. We’ve spent the whole book getting invested in these characters just to have them cross over in the end and go God knows where in some sort of moral lesson about bravery. Nope. Didn’t work. Ultimately, if it were possible, I’d give this book 2.5 stars because it’s a great idea with some charm that was, nonetheless, poorly executed.

What a quirky, fun read! I often enjoy reading YA fiction, and when intertwined with both cemeteries and Edgar Allen Poe - I’m in! This is a lovely book for upper middle school/high school readers - as it works to educate and uplift with strong messaging about being yourself, and working through pain. I applaud this book for tackling big issues in a ghoulish atmosphere - catering to those kids who feel other.
I received this book from NetGalley - via Lerner Publishing Group - in exchange for an honest review.

#NetGalley #OpenMicNightatWestminsterCemetery
Mary Amato has a wonderfully original and interesting book. The main character, Lacy, finds herself apart of the undead community of the Westminster Cemetery, but unsure of how she got there. She is struggling to find her place among the undead and her old life. The story is funny, sad, and at times silly yet at the heart of it is community and family. The ones we are born into and the ones we make. Amato's story is a little of Tim Burton, Coen brothers, and Ivan Reitman. It is a must read!

I really have no idea why this was rated so poorly and my only guess is someone didn’t actually read it because wow it was so much more than I could have ever imagined!

“Open Mic Night at Westminster Cemetery” tells the story of the dead who spend their night stuck in a routine guarded by strict rules when a young woman wakes and finds herself the newest member of their community. Already plagued as the outcast since she is considered a “modern” for dying after 1913 she struggles to find her place amongst the group and when the opportunity arises to host an open mic night she jumps at the chance to share her frustrations, pain, grief and truth with the others and encourages them to do the same with the hope that they can all finally find peace.

The first part of this reads like something Tim Burton would have a lot of fun directing as we have a group of people from olden times haunting the cemetery in which they are buried and the ways they go about interacting with Lacy, our lead heroine, is hysterical as it’s all done in a way that won’t anger the main antagonist who runs the place with an iron grip. Each character has such a strong personality that it’s easy to love them and once we get to the second half it really blows wide open as they each come into their own and share parts of themselves they’ve kept hidden for so long and each one was so powerful and heartbreaking but offered up a new layer to their current and past actions while also allowing for a chance at forgiveness and healing.

The ending really sticks with me and once we get the ball rolling I couldn’t read fast enough, the way they had these characters strip themselves bare and reveal the innermost workings of their soul while also dealing with the complicated emotions surrounding Lacy’s death and the presence of her grieving family sitting on the sidelines unaware of the ghostly presence was incredible and it really helped solidify this group and what it means to move forward in both life and death.

If you’re looking for something creepy and in tune with some of Poe’s work this probably won’t be for you but if you want something that I hope one day Burton and Lin-Manuel Miranda team up to make a film out of then this will be perfect.

**special thanks to the publishers and netgalley for providing an arc in exchange for a fair and honest review!**