LIFEL1K3 by Jay Kristoff

August 18, 2018 Kirsty Hanson

On a floating junkyard beneath a radiation sky, a deadly secret lies buried in the scrap.

Eve isn’t looking for secrets—she’s too busy looking over her shoulder. The robot gladiator she’s just spent six months building has been reduced to a smoking wreck, and the only thing keeping her Grandpa from the grave was the fistful of credits she just lost to the bookies. To top it off, she’s discovered she can destroy electronics with the power of her mind, and the puritanical Brotherhood are building a coffin her size. If she’s ever had a worse day, Eve can’t remember it.

But when Eve discovers the ruins of an android boy named Ezekiel in the scrap pile she calls home, her entire world comes crashing down. With her best friend Lemon Fresh and her robotic conscience, Cricket, in tow, she and Ezekiel will trek across deserts of irradiated glass, infiltrate towering megacities and scour the graveyard of humanity’s greatest folly to save the ones Eve loves, and learn the dark secrets of her past.

Even if those secrets were better off staying buried.

This is the first Jay Kristoff book that I’ve read, and I’ve got to say, I’m not 100% sure whether his writing style is for me… But then again, I can’t judge an author’s writing style based on one book. There was a lot of things that were good about this book, but then there were a lot of things that just didn’t do it for me.

“Your past doesn’t make calls on your future. It doesn’t matter who you were. Only who you are.”

― Jay Kristoff, Lifel1k3

There were a lot of weird slang words that I didn’t get and there wasn’t a glossary at the front or back to tell me what the words meant which was annoying, but from what I’ve gathered from other reviews, Kristoff tends to use a lot of slang in his other books as well – so I guess that’s just his way of writing.

For me, the negatives of this book were that I just wasn’t invested in any of the characters apart from Lemon. She was my favourite and probably the most fleshed out even though she was the protagonist. She was so cool, and I loved all of the sarcastic comments that she would make. I also really liked the friendship between her and Eve. I thought that their friendship was so cute and together, they kicked ass. But Eve as her own character didn’t do it for me; she was very two-dimensional.

“Breathing in the ink and feeling all those wonderful lives beneath you fingertips. In between the pages, I’m an emperor. An adventurer. A warrior and a wanderer. In between pages I’m not myself-and more myself than in any other place on earth.”

― Jay Kristoff, Lifel1k3

Another thing that I couldn’t wrap my head around was the romance element of Lifel1k3. It was boring, very insta-love in a way that I didn’t like, and it didn’t really have any development. So it was just… there. Also… I don’t really know that much about AI’s but Eve had sex with one, which means she had sex with a robot? Please, can someone clarify if an AI is a robot… Because I’ve seen Extinction on Netflix and the AI’s on there seem very human but I don’t know in this case. Clarification is much needed if anyone can help me out with this. But yeah, the romance was cardboard and felt forced so I didn’t feel like I wanted to ship them.

However, I really did like the concept of the story and a lot of people have said that they guessed what the plot twists were but honestly, I didn’t. I had no clue. This meant that when the atmosphere was being built towards one of the main plot twists, I was on the edge of my seat (or the aeroplane seat in my case), and I was transfixed by what was going to happen.

Overall, this was an enjoyable novel with a lot of twists and turns and a brilliant female friendship, but because of all of the hype that was surrounding it, I was let down a little bit. I know that there is going to be a sequel, and even though I gave this book a very average rating, I do think that I will be reading the sequel because I’m intrigued to learn more about the AI’s and their relationships with each other.