Tessa Young has lived fifteen years but only remembers eight of them.
After living a sheltered life with minimal proximity to those other than her family, an intruder nearly takes Tessa right out of her own home. A man named Brooks saves her by pulling her into an otherworldly painting. Brooks reveals he has been living in a painting watching over her for seven years- but no one told him why. He tells Tessa her mother was a reaper, a servant of death that captures souls and uses their memories to determine if the soul belongs in heaven or hell.
The reaper's long time enemy, the snatchers, have stolen a part of the Young family's soul called vitality. To return it, Tessa goes on an epic quest to become a reaper to find her family's vitalities and defeat the snatchers. Tessa travels to the land where reapers reside, Sceleflorus, and enrolls in the Vivemore Institute of Reaping. Tessa is sucked into a world of magic and danger she never thought possible- and there her life starts to unravel.
Tessa finds out she has no memory of the first eight years of her life. On top of that, no one knows how to find her family's vitality and one by one students are disapearing or their vitalities are getting snatched. If the Snatchers take over, it would wreck chaos on the afterlife and the Young family would stay asleep forever. In the mind-blowing paranormal fantasy, Tessa's mission is not only a life and death situation- but it's success dictates the existence of death itself.