Disappointing.

This was an interesting premise for a story, three people awaken on top of their graves on the same day, and although they had all died on the same date, their deaths had been several years apart and their graves were in the same city but not on the same site.

First they have to convince themselves that they are alive, but that the year has drastically changed; then they must convince other people that they are who they claim to be and adjust to their new circumstances.
In their previous existences, Frank had been the millionaire owner of a pizza company, Beverley was the coloured maid for a wealthy family and Madison had been just fourteen years old when a fire burned down her house and killed herself and her family.

So, an interesting idea for a novel, but sadly, this book was poorly edited and the same words and phrases were repeated...and repeated. The dialogue was weak and the narrator was struggling, particularly with the male voices.
I had agreed to review the audio version for Audiobook Boom and so I managed to complete it, but I'm afraid I would not read this author again, nor recommend it to others.

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"Somebody help me."

What would have made All of a Sudden better?

A good editor

Who might you have cast as narrator instead of Danielle Brown?

Numerous possibilities but an experienced voice actor, preferably male.

Any additional comments?

Oh, dear. This is one of those 'if' only' books - great concept and pretty good story, which kept me intrigued and wanting to discover what happens, but poorly written and with the wrong narrator compounding the flaws.
Three people - a black maid of a wealthy white couple who was raped and murdered by her employers in the sixties, a wealth businessman who has a heart attack during a confrontation with his embezzling son, and a teenage girl who dies in a fire - are all resurrected, next to where they were buried, on the same day in 2016. With no knowledge of what has happened in the period between their death and reawakening, they have firstly to come to terms with themselves and then attempt to recover their lives. A clever idea which leads into an equally good storyline.

Unfortunately, the writing does not match the sophistication of the story. The style is simple and childish, with frequent repetition and a high proportion of
dialogue, itself very repetitive of the ideas already given.. Then, too, the constant opening of a sentence with, "Well, ...", became very irritating quite quickly. To be fair to the author, the way in which people talk in real life is usually very different from dialogue in a book, with good reason - rarely are people slickly smart and articulate in everyday conversation so, quite possibly, the way in which these characters talk is far more realistic than is most fictional conversation. But it makes for very tedious listening in a book.

Much of this could have been at least partially disguised by an experienced and very talented narrator with great command of performance skills and multiple voices. Ms.Brown's voice is charming, clear and sweet - and very, very young. She would be perfect reading children's stories. What she was totally unable to do was give credible speech to the characters of this book, although she did try and her interpretation of the owner of the locker in which one of the main protagonist held a secret stash of money was very good. But he had only one line. So, not only was she unable to disguise the annoying "Well..." and other such, she gave the ongoing impression that the fourteen years old girl was a mere child of, say, seven or eight. Sadly, she was totally miscast for this reading.

By a combination of factors, therefore, and, especially, the youthful innocent inexperience of the narrator's voice, and the much too realistic dialogue with all of the flaws that this entails, this became a hard book to enjoy. I had received my copy, freely gifted to me by the rights holder, via Audiobook Boom. My thanks for that. I did appreciate the storyline itself and only wish that it had been better edited, removing much of the unnecessary repetitiveness and tidying the conversations.

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