Firstlife by Gena Showalter

Genre:  YA Fantasy

Everlife Series, Book 1

Gena Showalter's website

Amazon | Book Depository | Goodreads

Description (taken from Gena Showalter's website):

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 that 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…

In Ten's world, everyone knows what happens after death.  In fact, people pledge themselves to one of the two realms before they die.  There is Troika, a realm with eternal sunshine that values human life and choice above all else.  Then there is Myriad, a realm in the moonlight that values victory and winning above all else.  While Troika will give you a family and support you in the afterlife, Myriad will give you things you can only dream of if you are wanted.  But once you've pledged yourself, there's no going back.  And even if you know what happens in the second life, you don't really know until you die in the first one.

While locked up in an asylum that is good at making its patients choose the realm they've been paid to get them to choose, Ten has refused to pick.  Her father's contract with Myriad is on the line if she doesn't sign with them.  So they put her through all torture until she joins them.  But two laborers appear in the asylum.  They're there to pull her one way or the other.  But even in the end, it is her choice and one she must live with -or die with.

In the beginning, I was confused with how this world worked.  Two realms in the after life, got it.  But does everyone in this first life know about that?  Or only those that are being recruited?  I wasn't really sure.  And without this complete background, I grew skeptical of the story.  Not to mention the boy involved in the romance drove me nuts.  There were moments where I was engrossed in the story and wanted to know what happened.  But now that I've finished it?  I still don't really understand what the book was about other than choosing a side.  Heaven and hell?

I think this is going to be one of those books where you either love it or hate it.  Unless you're me; then you just think it's okay.  I'm not sure what to think with this one.

Thanks goes to Around the World ARC Tours for providing me a review copy.