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The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare: A Novel by [M.G. Buehrlen]

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MG Buehrlen

The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare: A Novel Kindle Edition

by M.G. Buehrlen (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

66 ratings

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“Forget popular books like The Hunger Games and Twilight, M.G. Buehrlen’s debut novel is something that every young adult fan should read” (The Founding Fields).

For as long as she can remember, seventeen-year-old Alex Wayfare has had visions of the past that seem so real they leave her breathless. For Alex’s visions actually wrench her from the present without warning, then return her with mysterious wounds and inexplicable aftereffects. Desperate for a normal life, Alex seeks to discover the meaning of her visions—and get rid of them.

Then Alex meets an enigmatic stranger who tells her the truth: She is a Descender, capable of traveling back through her fifty-six past lives by accessing Limbo, the space between Life and Afterlife. Suddenly, descending back in time is irresistible to Alex, especially when the same mysterious boy with blue eyes keeps showing up in each of her past lives.

But someone out there really doesn’t want Alex meddling with history. And they will stop at nothing to make sure her fifty-seventh life is her last . . .

Filled with “beautiful prose, an intelligent plot, and a heroine as fabulous as she is unique,” The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare is an adventure unlike any you’ve ever experienced before (C. J. Redwine, The Defiance Trilogy).

Reading age

12 - 17 years
Print length

387 pages
Language

English
Grade level

8 - 12
Publisher

Diversion Books
Publication date

April 12, 2015
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M.G. Buehrlen
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Kindle Edition
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Beautiful prose, an intelligent plot, and a heroine as fabulous as she is unique--I couldn't put it down!" ~ C. J. Redwine, author of the Defiance Trilogy
“I never expected The Fifty-Seven Lives of Alex Wayfare to be as good as it was. It took me completely by surprise and turned out to be quite possibly one of the best novels from Strange Chemistry books to date. Forget popular books like The Hunger Games & Twilight, M.G. Buehrlen’s debut novel is something that every young adult fan should read.”
- Bane of Kings, The Founding Fields

“It is addictive and completely unputdownable. M.G. Buehrlen has astounded me; she’s a genius. I couldn’t put this book down, couldn’t stop. There’s mystery and intrigue and about a thousand hints and red herrings to throw you off. This is the kind of book that needs to be read, book-club style, and talked about: “what’s going on?”, “who did this?” “whyyyyy?!” All this—and more. The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare is a stunning novel that is expertly written and paced and presented and—and everything. This book is beautifully heart-breaking and inspiring and terrifying and meaningful. It will surprise and delight and astonish.”
- Jet Black Ink

“a non-stop thrill-a-minute ride with some quick detours in our thinking necessary. I did not want this book to end, and will anxiously await the next book in the sequel! Looking for a good book? This YA sci-fi adventure is a good book!”
- Looking For A Good Book

“a fun, fast paced read…a wonderful debut novel, and I hope to see a sequel from this author soon.”
- Avid Reviews

“The writing is superb as is the character development. The story-line will rivet until the wee hours of the morning, and thankfully, the novel is longer than most so you can make the enjoyment last a little longer. I want more of this story and more of this author.”
- Koeur’s Book Reviews --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

When she’s not writing about teens who save the world, M. G. moonlights as a web designer and social media marketing buff, and she’s the current mastermind lurking behind the hugely popular website YABooksCentral.com, a social network for YA (and kids!) book lovers.

Places you might find M. G. hiding: in her creaky old house nestled in Michigan pines, sipping coffee on her porch, playing in leaf piles, cooking over campfires, and dipping her toes in creek beds. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07NDS4171
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Diversion Books (April 12, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 12, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1397 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 387 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #1,304,042 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #602 in Teen & Young Adult Loners & Outcasts Fiction eBooks
- #690 in Teen & Young Adult Loners & Outcasts Fiction
- #845 in Teen & Young Adult Time Travel eBooks

Customer Reviews:
66 ratings

About the author

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MG Buehrlen

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MG Buehrlen is the author of THE 57 LIVES OF ALEX WAYFARE and the upcoming THE UNTIMELY DEATHS OF ALEX WAYFARE (available Spring 2016). For 12 years, MG was a web-developer and social media director, and she co-developed YABooksCentral.com, the largest social network for YA book lovers. When not writing or web-developing, MG is a hipster-foodie-history-buff who, some say, is way too picky about the quality of her coffee.

Customer reviews

5 star		46%
4 star		32%
3 star		7%
2 star		7%
1 star		8%

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Top reviews from the United States

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The Housework Can Wait

A fun, energetic, timey-wimey romp through history

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2014

Verified Purchase

THE FIFTY-SEVEN LIVES OF ALEX WAYFARE does all sorts of things I don't see often in YA, and especially in this kind of intricately-plotted, genre-bending, world-building-heavy YA.

It gives our main character, Alex, an entire intact family unit, complete with parents, grandparents, and siblings, that is not dysfunctional in the slightest.

It puts at the center of the book a relationship that is in no way romantic, and a male lead who isn't even kind of swoony (unless you are about 40+ years older than the book's target audience, in which case 1) GOOD FOR YOU, and 2) go right ahead and swoon).

It presents three possible love interests for the main character, but at no time ever resembles a love triangle, square, hexagon, dodecahedron, or any other geometric shape. And of those three, not a single one is an obviously terrible choice.

Yet at the same time, Alex is not a She's-All-That-esque swan-in-ugly-duckling-clothing. When she takes off her nerd glasses, she is -- shockingly -- still a nerd. She never becomes magically popular. She isn't stunningly beautiful underneath her rumpled appearance. And she actually turns out to be less of a Chosen One than she originally thought.

This all brings me to the main reason I loved this book: It put characters first. A lot of time, even in good books, when there's this many EVENTS that have to happen on the pages, writers almost seem to run out of room to develop the characters. But with ALEX WAYFARE, the thing that kept me turning pages well past my bedtime wasn't the thrilling missions through time or the looming menace of the ever-nearing villain -- though those were fun too -- it was the heart in the characters. It was the fact that the characters rang true.

They reacted illogically. They made mistakes. They carried unfair prejudices. But these weren't just quirks. They weren't a laundry list of imperfections so that the characters could be more interesting. They gave the characters depth and history, even when I didn't agree with them.

Take Alex herself. At one point, she tells a boy that he should know that most girls are "shallow, shallow creatures." At first glance, a reader might be turned off by that line. That's an awfully sweeping statement to make about half the human race, isn't it? Isn't she a girl? Isn't her sister, who she adores, also a girl? Why does Alex think she's such a special snowflake?

But then you realize, Alex literally has no friends. Her only encounters with other girls are with the couple popular girls at school who bully her and gave her an ugly nickname. Everyone else seems to pretty much ignore her. She's under the impression that the entire school is constantly whispering about her, but in reality, they're probably not. It's just her perception of reality. As a result, she closes herself off and tries not to interact with anyone. Ever. So of course she thinks all girls are awful. Her only encounters with them have been negative, and as a coping mechanism, she's made sure that the only way she will continue to have contact with girls is if they seek her out. And who seeks her out? The bullies.

Vicious cycle.

This isn't the only example where Alex, or the other characters, rang true in their shortcomings. It's just one that stood out, because I remember going through a whole circuit of reactions when I read that line. Plus it's toward the end of the book, so it's fresh in my memory. I liked that MG Buehrlen didn't shy away from the less appealing aspects of her characters, but instead explored them and allowed me to see why they'd come to think or act the ways they did. In addition to being a bit prejudiced against her own gender, Alex is impulsive, naive, and kind of shockingly short-sighted at times.

But then these moments of weakness are balanced with strengths. Alex is also clever, inventive, brave, caring, and loyal. Her good points really do outweigh the bad, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching her develop and mature throughout the story. And she's not the only one. I loved her family, and how involved they all were in each other's lives. I loved Porter, her middle-aged mentor who teaches her about herself. And I loved Blue, the boy she meets over and over again in each of her lives, and Jensen, the boy on whom she blames her social misfit status.

Outside of the characters, though, I loved the story itself. I loved the creative spin on a reincarnation story, and how each journey into Alex's past highlighted a different point in history. The narrative weaves seamlessly through different eras, jumping from the modern day to Prohibition-era Chicago to a train heist in the Wild West. It kept me constantly on my toes, wondering where I'd be transported to next, and opened the door to endless possibilities in the future. And I followed the logic of the time travel pretty easily, with most of my questions being answered just a few pages after I asked them.

All in all, I loved the timey-wimey goodness that is THE FIFTY-SEVEN LIVES OF ALEX WAYFARE. It was a fun, energetic romp through history with characters I enjoyed following on their various (mis)adventures. It helped me rediscover my love of the genre, and made me excited for what's to come in the series. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, and when I turned the final page, I was left simultaneously satisfied and yearning for the next chapter in Alex's story. If you're a fan of time travel and adventure and history and heart, I highly recommend this one.

31 people found this helpful

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JGillespieSt

Featured in a Reading on a Theme on www. ...

Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2014

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Featured in a Reading on a Theme on www.intellectualrecreation.com

Alex Wayfare has visions of the past. She will be sitting in class and then suddenly be transported to Jamestown or the World's Columbian Exposition. The thing is, these aren't visions at all. Alex is traveling to the past. In the hopes that she will finally get some answers, Alex meets with Porter who explains that Alex has lived many lives, and she can slip back into her old lives.

The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare is really interesting. At points it is a little confusing, but I take confusing in stride when I'm reading books about time travel. M.G. Buehrlen's book combines afterlife, reincarnation, an evil genius, science experiments, time travel, and soul mates. I'm looking forward to the sequel.

Helpful

A. Irene

A complex sci-fi storyline woven with the drama of high school life

Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2014

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Buehrlen easefully weaves her readers through a complex sci-fi story line while simultaneously portraying the drama and self-deprecating angst of high school life for young women.

We meet Alex at a particularly painful moment in her young life. She is struggling to understand her "condition"--in the middle of living, without warning, she has strong visions which very much resemble the past. This condition leaves her doubting herself and makes her an easy target for bullying at school. At the same time, her sister is living with a particularly aggressive form of cancer and her survival is far from certain. Life is HARD for Alex Wayfare!

Early in the book she meets Porter, her guide to understanding that her visions are, in fact, an ability to travel to the past. However, Porter is not forthcoming, and in fact, lies. Alex is left to figure out the pieces through trail and error, risking her life and the future.

Thus, adding Porter to the mix of Alex's existing life leaves her, understandably, angry and frustrated, while, at the same time, the time travel, which she can now control, provides her a chance to see herself in a new light. It allows her to form relationships and shed some of the self-doubt created by her life.

It was, at times, hard for me to read Alex's self-deprecation. I wanted to hug her and tell her, "it's Porter's fault not yours!" But, rather than a shortcoming, this deprecation is a strength of Buehrlen's writing; it was difficult to read because it so accurately reflected back my own way of dealing with myself as a young woman. She cuts to the heart! High school is a time in life where young adults don't yet have the full freedoms of adulthood. It leads to the same kinds of anger and frustration that Alex experienced in relationship to her peers, with Porter, and with her inability to help her sister, which she then turns back onto herself in the from of self-deprecation. In this book, time travel, like taking the first steps in life after high school, allowed Alex the ability to grow, while also bringing new complexities.

I very much look forward to the next book to see where the storyline takes Alex, AND to see the ways in which this movement allows her to continue to grow.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Jessica

Unexpectedly great

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

I was not expecting this book to be as good as it was. This book is time traveling done right. Which is very difficult to do. I’ve been pretty disappointed in other time travel books lately but everything wrapped up well and was very cleverly intertwined. And mixing time travel with reincarnation and past lives was very interesting.

I loved the characters, it’s refreshing to see a teenage character who acts like a teenager rather than always doing what’s best for the world. Teenagers get panicky and self conscious and irrational but the author’s done this really well to make you still really root for Alex. I don’t normally like books with romance but I really enjoyed this. It had a lot of complicated relationships as well as the romantic one and the romance was never the be all and end all like it seems to be in a lot of YA. I’ll definitely be reading the sequel.

Aleksander Cristea

Time travel, adventure, and mystery perfectly blended for one awesome book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 27, 2014

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I have to admit that off the bat the synopsis of The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare wasn’t something that called to me. I don’t usually go in for anything that involves reincarnation or any kind of time shenanigans: mainly because stories I have encountered that involve such things in the past are either very predictable or become so confusing and tangled that the plot either seems to break or not hold water. But hey, I have this blind trust in Strange Chemistry that comes from liking all the books I have read by them so far, and so I picked up The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare without thinking too much about it.

And oh boy was I surprised. Within two pages I was hooked, within ten I already loved Alex and how the story was narrated. By fifty pages, this book quickly became one of those I just couldn’t put down (which wasn’t healthy for mine or my brother’s bedtime as I was being his audiobook for this one!). Alex is geeky, nerdy, different, and a whiz with technology. It’s nicely refreshing to have a female character being a whiz with technology without her being some kind of genius mechanic in a sci-fi context. Plus Alex is instantly likeable, and it’s impossible to not feel for her from the start: the eldest of three children, Alex is different. Since she was little, she’s had flashbacks, or deja vu, or whatever she decides to call the flashes of other lives that feel so much like hers without being. She’s terrified of cats and Ferris Wheels because of those flashes and has become an outcast at school for her strangeness. With her sister suffering from cancer, parents working hard to find a cure, and a younger sister who is ashamed to be related to her, Alex would give anything to be normal.

But normal isn’t for Alex, as she realises when, after a strange vision that takes hold of her out of the blue whilst she’s in class, she finds a note, addressed especially to her, that tells her that someone holds answers to her questions. So Alex goes, unprepared for the truth she is about to uncover and the ripples it threatens to have on her life. Alex is a Descender, but she is also more than that: hidden within Limbo lies the way to 56 past lives that Alex can travel to, taking over the body that her soul occupied and reliving events that have happened. But changing the past can have dire circumstances, and Alex has to watch what she does, which becomes especially hard when every time she travels back in time she meets the same blue-eyed boy who she feels inexorably drawn to. But to find who he is and what is going on, Alex may well have to risk everything she has and loves.

The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare is one of those books that doesn’t give the reader much time to breathe as we’re thrown from one discovery to the other, being made to doubt everything and everyone around Alex until it becomes impossible to know who can be really trusted. Buehrlen weaves the tale with perfect pacing and a deft efficiency when skipping in between Alex’s past and present without ever seeming to drag anything on or give too much or too little away. As I said above, Alex is a likeable, believable POV who becomes entangled in something far bigger than she could have ever imagined. And yes, she has a couple of freak outs that have regrettable consequences, but at least she is capable of not only owning up to them, but also moving past them, to becoming a better and stronger person.

The romance in between her and Blue is wonderfully built in the past through her adventures in 20s Chicago and is so totally believable that it’s hard to not feel heart broken when she has to be torn away from him. But then Blue keeps appearing, despite the fact that he should either be dead or could not possibly have been born yet. Blue’s story is linked far more closely to Alex’s fate than she realises and the book leaves us on one of the sweetest cliffhanger I have come across in a while. I can’t wait for book two to know if my theory is right or not, and I really, really hope it is (mainly because otherwise I am going to feel damn silly!).

But Blue isn’t the only boy of interest in Alex’s life. At school there is Jensen, the boy she has had a crush on for years and who is being nicer and nicer to her all of a sudden, a fact that Alex has problems coming to terms with. Jensen is the popular boy who all the girls love and who is said to flit from one to another. But as Alex finds out as they grow slowly closer, there is more to Jensen than what rumours suggest and he is just as much a victim of them as she is. It was nice to see a boy in the situation of being painted as a ‘man slut’ by those around him even though he is nothing of the sort. It was a nice change from girls being portrayed that way and it was also refreshing for it to be shown that just because people are popular, it doesn’t always mean they want to or aren’t suffering because of it.

The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare had me from the get-go. There was no going back after reading those first few pages that spoke to the reader with such honesty that it was impossible to not want to find out the ins and outs of the story. Alex can go proudly sit next to all the female heroines that kick ass whilst her book sits very much so near the top of my best books of the year list so far. There’s nothing to dislike about this book, nothing annoying and everything I want in a book: a good plot that takes time to be unravelled and fully understood, adventure, a very villainous and creepy villain, and a romantic relationship that I can’t wait to see coming more to fruition because these two deserve a bit of happiness, damnit!

J.Keam

Great plot with perfect characters - and amazingly written!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 20, 2014

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This YA book is so good for me because the romance takes more of a back seat: it's not a book full of oestrogen fuelled flirting, thank goodness! The characters are likeable and act realistically and you can really get into Alex's frame of mind. The romance that is there is well paced, and the plotline has some great twists and turns that show you just how much thought has gone into it - Roll on Alex Wayfare #2

Dia

It looks like there will be at least one more book to ...

Reviewed in Canada on May 26, 2015

Verified Purchase

The book has a very interesting and unique story. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Though the ending seemed a bit cramped and rushed. It looks like there will be at least one more book to follow. I am looking forward to it.

Listwriter

Intriguing!

Reviewed in Germany on June 10, 2017

Verified Purchase

The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare really kept me guessing. I liked Alex and her family, and Blue, of course. I look forward to the sequel!

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