Before I get too far into
talking about my thoughts on Firstlife,
I definitely need to mention that as I was reading this book, I constantly
found myself thinking about the book Divergent
by Veronica Roth and comparing this book to Divergent. Maybe that might not seem fair of me to do that, but no
matter how hard I tried to avoid comparing the two books, I just couldn’t seem
to help it a lot of the time. If you’ve read my review for Divergent, then you know that I
went into reading Divergent really
looking forward to that book, but I was ultimately incredibly underwhelmed and
disappointed by it. In my opinion, Firstlife
is very similar to Divergent in some ways;
however, Firstlife is a much better
book in the grand scheme of things.
That being said, as much I
was loved Firstlife, I’m not going to
deny that this book really confused the hell out of me at times as I was
reading it, which really made the story hard for me to follow at times. Honestly,
my overall experience with reading this book reminded me a lot of how I’ve always
thought that Lost was a really
awesome show, while also being a really weird and confusing show to watch at
times. Because Firstlife was a rather
hard story to follow and keep all the details of the story straight in my mind
as I was reading it at times, it’s definitely hard for me to describe the plot
of the book for the purpose of this review. I’m going to do my best, though.
Firstlife
is about a girl named Tenley “Ten” Lockwood who lives in a society where the
life that people are living now is referred to as “Firstlife”, while the
afterlife is referred to as the “Everlife”. People have to choose one of two
realms that they can make a contract with to live in when they die. The two
realms are Myriad, which basically values independence, happiness and
indulgence, while Troika is more about structure, equality, freedom of choice,
and standing up for what’s right. If you don’t pledge yourself to one of those
two realms, that means you’re unsigned and you’ll go to the Realm of Many Ends
when you die, which is basically the equivalent of hell. The two realms have
been at war with each other for centuries, and they both view Ten as being
special and what’s referred to as a Conduit, which means she has the ability to
help either realm win the war.
Because Ten refuses to sign
with either realm, her parents put her in an asylum where she has been for a
little over a year at the start of the book in an attempt to make her sign with
Myriad. Personally, Ten’s refusal to make a decision regarding what realm she
wants to sign with and the fact that the possibility of Ten signing with Troika
causes a lot of conflict between her and her parents is one of the ways this
book reminded me a lot of Divergent.
After all, in the society that Tris Pryor lives in, it’s viewed as a major
betrayal if a person chooses to join a different faction, rather than remaining
a part of the faction that they were raised in. Ten’s refusal to sign with
Myriad leads her father to give the doctors at the asylum his consent for them to
try and torture Ten into agreeing to sign with Myriad. The fact that her father
told them to torture Ten into signing with Myriad definitely put him in the
running to be featured in a blog post that I’m thinking about doing where I
discuss and debate which fictional characters from books that I’ve read
relatively recently have the worst parents.
