Review of Half Life

Have you ever thought how much you could accomplish if you could clone yourself? That’s what happens in this book. Check out my review of Half Life!

Half Life by Lillian Clark. To be published on June 9 2019 by Knopf. Thanks to the publisher for the review copy. This post contains affiliate links.

Synopsis: There aren’t enough hours in the day for Lucille–perfectionist, overachiever–to do everything she has to do, and there certainly aren’t enough hours to hang out with friends, fall in love, get in trouble–all the teenage things she knows she should want to be doing instead of preparing for a flawless future. So when she sees an ad for Life2, she’s intrigued. The company is looking for beta testers to enroll in an experimental clone program, and in the aftermath of a series of disappointments, Lucille is feeling reckless enough to jump in. At first, it’s perfect: her clone, Lucy, is exactly what she needed to make her life manageable and have time for a social life. But it doesn’t take long for Lucy to become more Lucy and less Lucille, and Lucille is forced to stop looking at Lucy as a reflection and start seeing her as a window–a glimpse at someone else living her own life, but better. Lucy does what she really wants to, not what she thinks she should want to, and Lucille is left wondering how much she was even a part of the perfect life she’d constructed for herself. Lucille wanted Lucy to help her relationships with everyone else, but how can she do that without first rectifying her relationship with herself?

Review of Half Life

Half Life was … a journey. Contemporary YA meets Black Mirror meets The Parent Trap with a hint of thriller.

For the first third, Half Life reads like a contemporary YA. Lucille is an model student who is suddenly thrown by her parents’ divorce, a friend break-up, and the fact that the guy she likes never notices her at all. So behind everyone’s back she decides to clone herself. That way, she figures, her clone can do all her work while she finally has some fun.

Things got a bit more confusing (and quite a bit more sci-fi) as Lucille starts attending her cloning appointments. When the clone is finished, she adds her POV. The clone’s parts are marked as “Lucy” (clone) and “Lucille.” Lucille decides to go off with a new guy she met at an internship and let Lucy the clone take over her old life. And of course things don’t go as planned at all – think some Parent Trap style hijinks.

Then the book turns into a bit of a thriller as Lucy finds out some alarming information about the cloning program and the two girls need to join forces.

All in all, I did enjoy Half Life. The tone and feel of the book was a little inconsistent and I found that jarring at times, but by the end it had a lot of heart and I was glad I read it.