Book Review: Firstlife by Gena Showalter

Firstlife (Everlife #1)
Author:  Gena Showalter
Publisher:  Harlequin Teen, 480 pages
Expected Publication Date:  February 23, 2016
*ARC received from publisher via NetGalley

From Goodreads:
ONE CHOICE.

TWO REALMS.

NO SECOND CHANCE.

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 home to the boy she’s falling for? She just has to stay alive long enough to make a decision…

Review:

This one was a bit of a mixed bag for me. LOVED the concept, with two different places you could go after your "firstlife." It definitely made me think about what the world would be like if everyone knew for sure there was an afterlife.  Would that lessen how important your first life was?

But I had a lot of questions about the two places, especially that it seemed such a slam dunk which place was good and which place was not. Why was Ten so undecided? Not sure that made sense to me. I mean, come on, one place was in perpetual darkness, the other in light.

And I'm a big Gena Showalter fan (can I just tell you how much I loved Cole Holland from The White Rabbit Chronicles?) but I was a little disappointed with the love interest.  For some reason I wasn't feeling it, but that may be because of ultra high expectations.  Also, I wasn't sure who the love interest was going to be.  There are two guys and you think there's going to be a love triangle, but one ends up being a friend, like a big brother type (no romantic feelings on either side) and the other ends up the love interest.  But it seemed kind of sudden to me, no build up, etc.  It's like suddenly this guy is the brother friend guy and the other one is the love interest. And Ten doesn't spend that much time with either one of them so I never FELT the relationships develop.

Ten is a fantastic main character, the world is interesting, so I will be continuing the series.

Posted by:  Pam