Firstlife

High School Fiction

VG/A Showalter, Gena. Firstlife. Harlequin Teen.2016. 468p.  978-0- 373-21157- 9. 17.99

In Firstlife, we discover a society where the people are given two choices to go when they die. There is the Myriads and the Troikans. For those who remain unsigned, after they die they go to the outer
realms to a place called The Many Ends which is a limbo of in-betweeness and seen as the rough place to be and live out their second life. Tenley aka Ten Lockwood's family is high up in the Myriads food chain and so it was assumed that she would happily sign with them. However Tenley refused to sign to any party and her family puts her inside an insane asylum where they will try and break Ten by making her choose. Her strength and ability to not be broken come to the attention of Myriads and Trokians and they both want her for their own reasoning as there was a prophecy about someone who held the right amount of light and darkness - had a balance that could make one party better than the other. So both parties send in a Labourer to try and get her to sign, but what happens when she starts to fall for one of the Labourers and sees the other as her new best friend. What will Ten do?
Dawn Fechter, Inglewood Public Library