Book Review:
Half Life
by Lillian Clark
Pub Date: 09 Jun 2020
It took me half of the way through this book to become more than half interested in Half Life. If I could give it half the stars (2.5), I would.
I had a problem from the get-go with the clone company's ability to "decommission" their clones with no remorse to the clone's humanity as well as why a sentient clone would allow themselves to be "decommissioned." Sure, tension, conflict, and all of that, but it didn't provide me with a realistic scifi atmosphere; it was more of a manipulated fantasy. The only way I could justify the use of decommissioning without concern for the clone being decommissioned was to assume there was going to be some kind of dun.dun.dun. moment; there wasn't. The disregard for the 'experiment' was simply disregard for the experiment.
In the first 49% of the book, I only made one comment under the "interesting" category: That Lucy the clone could express, "Missing someone you've never met is the strangest feeling." In hindsight I felt there was too much set up of Lucille, her psyche, her issues, her self-esteem issues, in order to justify the story line. It took up half of the book, which left me with half of a book to enjoy. After Lucille's character was established during the first half of the book, the entire tone of the book changed and became more engaging and took on a better pace. Students who need to be absorbed by a book in the first 10-20 pages might not make it to the better half of the book.
I couldn't decide if I liked that it took me (i.e., the reader) a while to figure out that Lucille was self-absorbed and that Lucy was more empathetic to people than Lucille was. I finally came to appreciate the irony of Lucy's humanity as juxtaposed to Lucille's. What bothered me then, was how it emphasized how inhumane the cloning company was. AH! So that was the point! Well done, Ms. Clark. On the other hand... it was a plot manipulation to have no one actually ask each other about their feelings or intentions: Lucille and Lucy didn't talk; they just assumed. Same with the company; they just assumed they had non-sentient beings instead of asking or figuring it out? Not a very good model of the scientific method. Moreover, was Lucille really so self-absorbed that even she didn't think of Lucy as sentient? That required a whole lot of suspension of disbelief this far into the story.
Good parts? The second half was filled with fun, sometimes witty and snarky banter; the author was very good at this kind of flirtatious dialog. Her timing and not taking innuendos too far worked well for her characters. The second half also used really good, interesting vocabulary that added to the story when it could have detracted from it (omnipresent, nihilist, ersatz, absconding).
Quirks if the second half? Just after the half way point the author alluded to the fluid nature of [teen] sexual identity by using the word 'allo,' which refers to someone who experiences sexual attraction to others as opposed to being asexual. The second half of the book continued to allude to gender-neutral terms of address (Mx.) and "their' instead of "his or her." Why did it take this long for the author to use this language? It almost felt like her editor told her she had to put it in somewhere, so it got dropped in. (Also, based on the chronological setting of the book, was it really necessary to slip in a snide remark about the POTUS?)
If it weren't for my commitment to NetGalley and the publishers to complete my reviews in exchange for early readership approval, this was almost a DNF. Half Life would have only had a half life for me.
