 hey guys it's julia and welcome back to my channel and for today's video i'm going to be bringing you guys a very exciting review video and today i'm going to be talking about later by steven kink this is king's new and release and we follow a young boy named jamie who can see the dead so we follow him and his mother and his mother's girlfriend jamie's mother is dating a woman named liz who is in the police force and she drags jamie out sometimes to talk to the people that have died and see if they could if he could help solve the case this book does have quite a bit of trigger warnings that i found with it so i will list those up on the screen just for those who need them or want to know them uh just be aware that this content's in here the somebody themes in this book were parenting writing trauma and financial issues so those were four themes that i found in this book that i thought were very interesting about the characters first just to like get started but i really really like jamie he was kind of like the king trope of like the young boy who has a certain ability and that's very different from everybody else so i i really did like jamie's narration the story was told from jamie's point of view but he's reflecting on his past and what happened and the word later has the title is used a ton throughout the novel to kind of just say i'll mention this later or we'll get to this later i did like how blunt jamie was though and how just honest he was and if he had a bad vibe about something he just he just knew when he tried his best to like make everybody happy so the mom is a literary agent so the first case that they hear of is an author who dies and the mother is like a huge fan of the book series and she was the deceased's old literary agent so she did have like a personal connection to this so then with the help of her friend liz and with the help of jamie they like got to communicate with this dead person and try to get some answers out of him themes in this book i thought were really interesting again financial issues are brought up same with parenting the father's not in the picture in this story so jamie is just being raised by his mother it's also mentioned in the trigger warnings but the themes of substance abuse are pretty prominent throughout this book especially towards the end liz was a character that was kind of morally great at times like i could feel sorry for her and throughout the book i definitely went through my share of different moods and like kind of thoughts about her specifically some references that i saw in this book where one a shashank redemption reference which was nice to and the other one was steven king quoting himself like jamie says like i heard a great writer say books are uniquely portable magic or something and i know that's a king quote so i think it's kind of funny that he just quoted himself something that's really talked about in this is the ritual of chud which is a connection to it by steven king in that book in that universe and the ritual is like from a malaysian culture i will link a website for about about the ritual of chud that i found online and i thought i was looking at and it kind of just connected a few more dots for me with this book that it's also connected to that as well and as you read more and more you'll learn you'll like you'll hear mentions of the ritual of chud in this so overall what did i think i enjoyed the writing style i like jamie's perspective i like that he was blunt and that he was just like you know a kid that had some special abilities just like a lot of king's work like i like that he does that trope and i think he does it well i like the use of the word later and there's like a lot of symbolism that can be taken from that as well i did enjoy the characters and i really liked liz just as a complex character as well but yeah i thought she was a very interesting character and this book does deal with a lot it covers a lot there's bombings in this book and there is a lot of things that happen but for like the size of it it was super enjoyable as well like it's not even that long of a book but it really had a lot in here there's also like demons in here kind of so there is like that supernatural component in here as well i like that the dead couldn't lie in these books and that if you approach them when they were kind of in like a purgatory middle land kind of thing you could ask them questions and they do have to tell you honestly which i thought was interesting and it was very helpful in the case of a police officer asking what a young child to help uh just talk to dead people so it was very interesting and i'm glad that i picked it up i do want to talk a little bit about some spoiler things so i will kind of end the video off for you guys who haven't read it yet but thank you so much for watching i hope you guys liked the video and if you pick up or you're interested in picking up later let me know i think i'm giving it about a 3.5 stars or like think about a 3.5 or a 3.75 like it was i really did enjoy it though and it was a really good read i know how i feel about it in comparison to like joyland just because i read that one so long ago but they are like both the hard case crime um publishing company books okay time for some spoilers so this is first off this is my little journal page this is my journal page so we got some of my tabs here so blue is for characters pink was for plot green was for themes and orange is for important yeah okay you can see the colors uh so i did it take some notes throughout this but i wanted to touch on some of the things that are also trigger warning but also just major kind of like kind of like plot points firstly the incest thing i was really shocked by that i really don't know how that came up and then jamey tried to explain you know that maybe they were too close and then they had sex blah blah blah blah but then he's like i actually never asked so like that's not even true so like were they related because that's that's a thing in itself uh it was a very unexpected turn of events that just kind of showed up at the end i was like i was not expecting an incest plot twist i was really not the substance use i thought was very interesting just seeing lives go through what she did and you could tell like when jamey would talk about even how her nose looked and how the bottom of it looked and that it was always bleeding and then it was always like kind of scabbed and it was like because of the cocaine and that kind of thing it was just really interesting to hear and to see like a young person's perspective of someone who's going through it with addiction right now and like liz is clearly very a flawed character but again i really liked reading from like about her because because she was so complicated he like at first i thought she really really cared for jamey's mom and jamey and the family and then she did bring drugs until their home which again was pretty shocking was not really expecting that whole thing to go down but i think liz was just she was the dirty cop character and i just thought because the main character was so close to her at one point and all of that stuff it was just made for a really interesting book i want to go through some of the characters that i didn't really touch on before so like mrs mr berkett is mentioned mrs berkett dies from a stroke near the beginning the bicycle man from central park who's robert harrison that's the ghost that really freaked jamey out when he saw him and you know he sees them how they died so they might have a hole in their head and that kind of thing you guys have read it if you're here so you already know but rakes Thompson was the author who died and jamey described him as a jewel i remember that he was a really good person and stuff thumper was the killer that was on the news a lot and he was the bomber thomas is yeah rakes thomas and Valerie Gomez is mentioned later and she's just james crush at one point so that's why i had her name written down the things that i noted was it was mentioned light is shining through here so i might look very washout jamey's mother smoked cigarettes and he picked up the habit from her and then i thought about how jack and danie had that similar relationship where you know danie thought it was kind of like didn't want to be an alcoholic and like didn't want to end up like his dad and then he ends up like his dad and i just thought it was similar to how jamey also picked up one of his parents bad habits so that's just like a little connection that i made that i wanted to share just about the ritual of chud that was used to defeat it uh in the novel and then i also saw that in it chapter two the ritual of chud was mentioned again in the film and in the original it there was the ritual of chud but it was like a little bit different than the other versions so i might look into more of that just because i think it's very interesting and it is clearly connected with these books so i think that's a very interesting part of the universe that he's combining there so yeah i'm excited to look into that further as well overall i really liked later it's not my favorite king it's not my least favorite it was it was just pretty solid though but i'm i am glad i read it so if you are thinking about picking it up well if you've stayed this far then you've picked it up point is let me know your thoughts on it in the comments down below thank you so much for watching this video i really really appreciate it and i hope you guys are all doing well staying safe the sun is shining very right now and yeah i will talk to you guys soon if you want to follow me i have instagram twitter goodreads i have pinterest i have spotify i have a letterbox i have tiktok yeah so if you want to follow me on any of those you can as well i also have a steven king playlist if you want to see more steven king review videos oh yeah thank you guys so much again for watching and i'll see you super soon bye