Book jacket design for Tomas Cizek's The Ruse
Jo-Jo Dyas doesn’t believe he has any reason to live, but then he finds the naked black-and-white dead girl in the culvert and she convinces him otherwise. She is the drummer for a punk rock band called the Fiendish Lot, and for a dead girl, she has more life and spark than anyone Jo-Jo’s ever met. She and her band come from the Afterlife, a strange, colorless world where souls sometimes pause on the journey between life and death.
Jo-Jo follows her into the depths of the Afterlife, where gets a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make right all the things that have gone wrong in his life.
“Auseon's vision of the Afterlife is unique and wonderfully described. But his description of the band that the young girl is in--The Fiendish Lot--and the music they play is just out of this world (no pun intended). Auseon really hit his stride with this novel. I highly recommend this and look forward to his next books.”
-Goddess Librarian
"Outrageously inventive!"
-School Library Journal
“I am pleased to say that my high expectations for this novel were exceeded. I immensely enjoyed Auseon’s unique version of death and the afterlife because it was so creative and entirely unlike any other book I’ve read on the same topic.”
-Book Muncher
“Music-obsessed teens will respond to Auseon's firm grasp of the transformative and life-changing power of a kick-ass rock show.”
-Booklist