Good morning, y’all!

I am so excited to be reviewing Jay Kristoff’s Lifel1k3 today. It was recommended to me by a friend (@l.k.middlebrook.writes on Instagram – go follow her!) and I could not be more thankful for the recommendation. I would absolutely recommend this book to others – I just gave it to my mom, actually!

Now onto the review –

I finished this book on Thursday night and I’m glad I gave myself a few days before writing this review, as some of my opinions about what happened in it have changed!

Overall Rating: 5/5 stars

Brief Summary: Eve Carpenter, a botdoc and fighter who lives on the west coast of a post-apocalyptic USA (“Yousay”) seems to be having an awful day when we first meet her. She loses a bot match, meaning she doesn’t make the money for her VERY sick grandpa’s medicine, and she’s just realized she can fry machines with her mind, which brings a fanatical cult called “The Brotherhood” after her. To make matters worse Eve, her best friend Lemon Fresh, and small robot Cricket find a humanoid bot named Ezekiel that seems to know Eve from her past.
When one of Ezekiel’s kind comes to destroy Eve and her friends, Ezekiel defends them all, but fails to save Eve’s grandfather from capture. In the ensuing pages, the motley band of Eve, Lemon, Cricket, Ezekiel, and robotic dog Kaiser trek across the dangerous and barren country to save what Eve loves most, learning more about the secrets of the past every step of the way.

Best Parts: There’s a lot of good to say about this book. First of all, the pacing was nearly perfect. I almost never got bored and something was continually going on in either the plot or subplot to think about. Kristoff does a great job of blending characters to show the differences in personality during these action sequences – it was interesting to see how Eve and Ezekiel interact with each other vs. Cricket and Ezekiel, or Eve and Lemon.
Kristoff’s characterization was spot on for the entire book. I think my absolute favorite part of this book actually was how dynamic Eve and Lemon were. By the end of the book, the two girls change completely from who they were at page 1.

Room for Improvement: My criticism is a little nit-picky since I really did love the book. The descriptions of setting at the beginning were good, but as the book progressed, they seemed more confusing and I couldn’t easily imagine where the characters were supposed to be. Along with that, I’m personally not a huge machine/robotics fan, so that aesthetic wasn’t super interesting to me as I read. But as I said, very nit-picky comments full of personal preference in an otherwise incredible story.

Final Review: I have a ton more feelings about this book, but they all involve like MAJOR spoilers and I won’t do that to y’all. However if you’ve read Lifel1k3 and you want to talk about it, DM me on Instagram and we will gush about it for 3 hours.

Thanks for stopping by, y’all! Happy reading!