Title: Firstlife
Author: Gina Showalter
Publisher/Year: Harlequin 2/23/16
Length: 332 Pages
Series: Everlife #1
Overview
Tenley “Ten” Lockwood is an average seventeen-year-old girl…who has spent the past thirteen months locked inside the Prynne Asylum. The reason? Not her obsession with numbers, but her refusal to let her parents choose where she’ll live—after she dies.
There is an eternal truth most of the world has come to accept: Firstlife is merely a dress rehearsal, and real life begins after death.
In the Everlife, two realms are in power: Troika and Myriad, longtime enemies and deadly rivals. Both will do anything to recruit Ten, including sending their top Laborers to lure her to their side. Soon, Ten finds herself on the run, caught in a wild tug-of-war between the two realms who will do anything to win the right to her soul. Who can she trust? And what if the realm she’s drawn to isn’t where the boy she’s falling for lives? She just has to stay alive long enough to make a decision…
My Thoughts
I’m a girl who’s at times swayed to read a book based by the cover art more so than the plot, and i have to say that the cover of this one drew me in more than anything. The interesting thing is though, that there’s a unique story here – one that really intrigued me from the get go. While i’m going to say that overall this was a fairly decent book, it was a bit slow moving at times, and i’m still not sure what to make of this first installment of the series.
Like the summary says, our leading lady is Ten – a girl who when she was born was marked by both realms of this interesting world as being something special. Each seems to think that she’s got the ability to bring great change to their society yet, she’s given the chance to choose which side she wants and through a series of events from her family, and her life, she doesn’t know what to choose which results in her being sent to an asylum of sorts where she’s punished, tortured and forced to lead a horribly bad life.
Throughout this story, it’s basically grounded in communications between 2 guys who are sent from either realm to sign her, and these boys notes back to their superiors. What we see is that what starts out though as a ‘job’ of sorts turns into something much more when both guys (Killian and Archer) somehow get emotionally attached.
We see a lot of death, a lot of scheming, an interesting backstory of how Archer and Killian know each other and have come to be enemies, and along the lines, there’s quite a bit of romance brewing. Ultimately, secrets are revealed, and yet some continue to fester, but all in all, we see that there’s so much more to the realms and to the world that even those in the realms know, and that means that the need for Ten to make a choice and bring the world to it’s knees in a sense is that much more important.
The decision that she makes at the end is somewhat surprising since i actually didn’t think that she’d ever choose – but i think that there’s more than romance and good v bad behind that choice and we’ll have to see how it plays out in the next book. All in all a fairly interesting problem that we have.
the biggest downside that i have though with this one though to be honest, is that like i said earlier, it was a bit slow. I mean, our author does a great job with describing where we are and what they are seeing – what’s going on and all that, but i feel like there were chapters where things just dragged a bit and it was only through the fact that i HATE putting books down that i made it through. At least the ending was a decent cliffhanger so i’m invested and can’t wait now until next february to get the 2nd one.
On that note – happy sunday all and i’ll be back soon!