I enjoyed The Afterlife of Holly Chase very much – but I didn’t love it until the very last page. The end is what earns it a spot on my keeper shelf, and I won’t reveal the end, no, not even in a spoiler tag. You just have to trust me that it’s lovely.

Holly Chase is a rich teenager who is a simply horrible person. At the age of seventeen, she is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future. Holly is, of course, familiar with A Christmas Carol and recognizes the gist – the three ghosts try to convince her to be a better person. Holly laughs it all off and dies a week later, hit by a car while exiting a yoga studio. Holly is, alas, a “failed Scrooge.”

However, instead of going straight to whatever afterlife may or may not exist, Holly is recruited by The Scrooge Project. Every year this team tries to save a Scrooge. Holly is The Ghost of Christmas Past. At the start of the book, Holly has settled into this existence when a new Scrooge throws her life into disarray. He’s a very cute teenage boy named Ethan – the only teen Scrooge that the company has ever had to deal with, with the exception of Holly. Naturally Holly gets a crush on Ethan and her afterlife becomes very, very complicated as she meets Ethan in real life (she’s a corporeal ghost – don’t over-think it) and becomes his mysterious girlfriend.

Part of the fun of this story is that it’s a remake inside a remake: Holly’s Scrooge story is playing out as her team tries to recreate another Scrooge story. The project sifts through the subject’s memories, trying to identify parallels to key Christmas Carol characters – the Fay, the Belle, the Cratchit, the Fezziwig, etc. The parallels have to be thematic, not exact. For instance, in A Christmas Carol, Fay is Scrooge’s much-loved sister who dies young. The new “Fay” doesn’t have to be an actual sister but it does have to represent a positive character from the subject’s childhood who was lost. This takes up most of the year for the team, culminating in the appearance of the ghosts.

However, Ethan’s story doesn’t fit the narrative. The team is driven up the wall by the fact that they can’t find the right parallels in Ethan’s life for the characters in Scrooge’s life. They are especially frustrated with their failure to find Ethan’s Belle (Belle is Scrooge’s ex-girlfriend, who broke up with him because of his greed). In fact, Ethan isn’t a very good parallel for Scrooge. He’s already matured past the bullying behavior that first flagged him as a potential Scrooge. Mostly he’s just rude and inflexible, which is a problem but not a Scrooge-level problem.

Meanwhile, Holly’s attempts to spend time with Ethan in his real, waking life are indefensible yet relatable. They are indefensible because Holly has to lie to Ethan about everything, including her name, and has to lie to her team about having met Ethan. Additionally, in being with Ethan, Holly is endangering his chances of being redeemed on Christmas (she keeps messing up the narrative, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose). Most of the plot involves Holly hiding things from people with increasing difficulty.

Holly’s actions are relatable because, as the book’s narrator, Holly communicates the depth of her loneliness before and after her death so well. Of course she’s drawn to Ethan – they have similar backgrounds and have suffered similar losses, not to mention the fact that he’s the first boy her age that she’s encountered in a long time. This book is very funny, and I promise that the end is happy, but Holly’s life and afterlife are terribly sad. Holly is a wonderful narrator who is aware of how awful her actions are but finds herself compelled to keep going, and who communicates how desperately people cling to their defense mechanisms even when those mechanisms are crappy.

I figured that this book would have a twist and I thought that I knew what it was and exactly how the story would end. I was wrong about the second part. I was truly surprised and delighted by how this story ended up. It solved the ethical problems I had with the romance, it was clever, and I worked perfectly with everything that led up to it. I will be adding this to my holiday book box to read again next year!