The Downside of Firstlife
I really wanted to like this book. I really, really did. It ticked a lot of my boxes: Paranormal(ish)? Check. Hot guys? Check. Strong female lead? Check. But something got lost along the way. Let's take a deeper look into the downside of Gena Showalter's Firstlife.
In a sentence: Girl has to pick which of two hot guys to spend eternity with after crappy parents send her to jail.
WARNING: Only gentle spoilers ahead. I just can't make myself get too deep in details for this one.
Synopsis: Tenly Lockwood is imprisoned in an asylum/prison because she refuses do what her parents tell her and to sign away her everlife to Myriad, one of three realms a person can go to after they die in their "firstlife". The other realm, Troika, has been a violent enemy of Myriad forever. If a person does not sign to Myriad or Troika, their second life (or "everlife") is spent in Many Ends, a land of torture, pain, etc.
After being incarcerated for a few months, Tenly gets a new roommate who turns out to be from Troika. There's also a new inmate from Myriad who swears he can get her to sign with them after one date. Well, Tenly is not going to decide and the rest of the book is basically a constant battle between Troika and Myriad attempting to get Tenly to sign. Killian, the boy from Myriad, is smoking hot, covered in tattoos, and has an Irish accent. Archer, the boy from Troika, is the typical golden child, also smoking hot, and compassionate and trustworthy.
Who will Ten choose?
THOUGHTS: I didn't enjoy this book. I really, really dig the concept, but there were too many problems for me to get attached.
In my last post I talked about the pacing of a story and made a point that it has to move along at a good speed. This book went from 0 to 150 in three pages and never slowed down. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, in between fight scenes, paragraphs about injuries, and paragraphs about which guy was hotter, there was no time for real character development. I wasn't able to really connect with any of the characters because I wasn't given much time to get to know them.
The main character, Tenly, is basically a spoiled rich girl who learns that life isn't fair when her parents send her to a torture facility when she decides to make her own decisions rather than blindly follow the path they set for her. THIS IS ALL THE INFORMATION WE GET ABOUT TENLY. Her parents were rich. She was always sheltered and given everything she wanted. She realized there was more to the world that what her parents told her and she got punished for standing up against them.
There's a really cool subplot about how Tenly is be obsessed with numbers. Why she has this obsession, why numbers comfort her, why she remembers the number song - none of it is explained. It crops up at the oddest times and, if I had an understanding of why numbers were so important to her I would have liked Tenly a lot more. We don't even know how her mom came up with a name like Tenly!
The two main love interests, Killian and Archer, are run-of-the-mill romance tropes. Killian is the dark handsome bad boy, while Archer is the golden prince who fights for justice and will always follow the rules. We get a little more backstory on them, but only for the sake of fueling their rivalry.
There are also major issues with the plot: once the violence starts, it doesn't stop. Almost every page has an injury, a death, someone stabbing someone else in the back, but there is no relevant plot to support the carnage. The entire book takes place over (maybe?) a three week period (Tenly blacks out and wakes up a lot, making time really hard to track). However, Tenly's parents had her in the asylum/prison place for about seven months before anybody thought to step in and up the ante. Why is Tenly suddenly such a hot commodity? No one seems able to step back for a second and go "Why is this chick so important again?"
Tenly is seventeen - at eighteen she'll be considered an adult and able to make all of her life decisions herself. There are other characters younger than Tenly who have already signed with Myriad or Troika (Sloan and Clay to name two). Killian and Archer are trying to get Tenly to sign ASAP - why didn't Ten's parents make her pledge with Myriad when she was fifteen? Or sixteen? This plot hole really bothered me, because there seemed to be a double standard - they can't wait for Tenly to turn eighteen and make a decision on her own (a reasonable request that she asks for), but her parents couldn't make her pledge at an earlier age?
There's another issue surrounding Killian and Archer growing up from babies in the Everlife, but I'm not going to get into that.
Overall, I was left with more questions than answers when I finished Firstlife, and not in a good way.
CONCLUSION: If you like fast-paced romance you might like this book. Honestly, I have a few people that I would recommend this book to because I know they'll like it. For me, this book had too many unanswered questions, little to no character development, far too little backstory and way too much violence without plot.
Will I read the next book in the series? Maybe. Will I come back and re-read this book? Definitely. Gena Showalter has a nice writing style, and I did enjoy the general feel of the book. I still find the concept interesting and if they made this book into a movie, I'd go see it. But for me, Firstlife won't go on my favorites shelf.