Lifeblood (Everlife, #2)

by Gena Showalter

[Linda]

This review was originally posted on (un)Conventional Bookviews
Lifeblood didn't fully live up to my expectations, as Ten didn't seem the same, strong, independent girl she was in Firstlife.



In the first book, Ten, while not being exactly decisive, did manage to be quite independent once she escaped the institution she was locked up in. I had quite high hopes for Lifeblood, seeing Ten deal with her afterlife, living in a realm different from the boy she had spent a lot of time with - one who was protecting her and fighting alongside her until the end. What got to me was that for a lot of the time, Ten was mooning over Killian rather than getting to know Troika and the Troikans she was supposed to spend eternity with. She was not working very hard at unlocking her key to the grid, nor at understanding just how her realm worked. She was quite judgemental, and I found her to be a lot less interesting than she was in Firstlife.

There was some action, with fights between the realms, and fights over humans who were unsigned. I just didn't feel like I was involved in any of it in Lifeblood. The realms were less interesting, and I found the characters to be a lot flatter than those I met in the first book. It could be that this one suffers from second book syndrome, and I will definitely pick up the next book in the series, but my expectations will be lowered accordingly before I get to it.

Lifeblood was in many ways just more of the same as in Firstblood, though. The realms fighting over humans, and also fighting each other. Light and dark, good and evil *sighs* just that here, Ten was not human anymore, she was a spirit. And she was a lot less discerning of the people around her, not understanding that because they were all spirits, they weren't really different from what they had been as humans. She remembered her life from before, but it didn't seem to me as if she had really learned anything from it. And she didn't appear to realise that all other Troikans also held on to who they had been as humans.

Written in first person point of view from Ten's perspective, I think it made it worse because I really didn't enjoy her very much in Lifeblood. It was not fun to be in her head, and even with the dialogues and the action, the story didn't really work well for me.



My worth isn't measured by other people's feelings for me. I am who I am, and my worth is my worth.

Those dreams... They can mean one of two things: something or nothing.

Love that comes with strings isn't love. It's just another form of selfishness, liking what the other person can do for you or make you feel.