I want to thank NetGalley, Random House Children’s, and author Lillian Clark for providing me with an ARC of this novel!

When I saw Black Mirror mentioned in the blurb for this book, I was instantly pulled in. Lucille was such an amazing main character who I really enjoyed following. She is a 16-year-old overachiever, always wanting more. When she sees an ad for Life2, she’s intrigued. It turns out this company is one of the first with the technology and knowledge to clone people. Lucille becomes a candidate, and she ends up with her clone, Lucy. But Lucy is not at ALL what she expected. I loved the themes of individuality and the way that the topic of anxiety was covered. This is a thrilling and compelling read, one that will make you think about a few what-ifs. You’ll want to tell your friends about this one for sure!

Thank you to those named above for the chance to read and review this novel!

I wish this book had been longer and more fleshed out! Loved the concept and the characters, but I wanted more. So much opportunity to explore the concepts more.

Half Life was such an amazing read! Combining typical high school drama-- romance, friendships, and academic pressures-- with slightly creepy, high-tech science, Half Life truly stands out.
I especially liked the way Lucille was depicted: I think her anxiety and need to be perfect was extremely well-written. Her struggles-- from her inner monologue about feeling like people are thinking badly about her to her need to overachieve, is extremely reflective of how I felt in high school and continue to feel today as a college student. All of the other excellent qualities of this book aside, I think that plenty of teens and even adults will be able to see themselves in Lucille.
Aside from that, the writing style drew me in immediately, and I loved every single character in the book. Even the side characters (like Cass's friends) were fully fleshed out and not at all flat or forgettable. I think it's incredible how the author was able to distinguish Lucy from Lucille so well. I often have trouble remembering whose point of view it is in a lot of books, even when one character isn't a literal clone of the other. I didn't have this problem once in Half Life. The story itself was constantly riveting: I couldn't put this book down and read it all in one sitting.
I highly, highly, highly recommend Half Life to anyone who likes sci-fi or contemporary, as well as anyone who's struggled with anxiety. This book now holds such a special place in my heart because of the way Lucille's anxiety and self-doubt was depicted, and I think that it could really resonate with many other readers as well.
4.5/5 stars*

This book is stunning! The science, the psychology, and the real teen experiences, coupled with Clark's witty writing are extraordinary!
From the moment I opened this book, I felt a kinship with Lucille, and as she grew and changed through the story, I found myself fully invested in her future.
This is an incredible ride!

I thought the book was overall ok. It doesn’t belong in a high school classroom as it is very narrow minded I think personally in its target audience.

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.

This was a great YA read! I thought the characters, plot, and pace were well crafted. I loved Lucille's self-doubt and insecurity, her uncertainty. I appreciated the way her character developed. The treatment of Lucy as a wholly developing entity was a departure from the normal treatment of 'clones' in science fiction, and I loved her so much. The supporting characters were fabulous and the mom, especially, cracked me up. Clark worked in her bioethics debate in with finesse and balanced it well with the ever-popular (but always relevant) theme of self-discovery in adolescence. GREAT READ!

Lucille is an overachiever who never feels like she's good enough. A sinister company is able to prey on her insecurities to lure her into being secretly cloned with the promise of having two "selves" to lighten the burden of daily life, but things don't turn out the way she planned. Self cloning is my favorite sci-fi trope, so I was really excited to see this new YA take on it and I was NOT disappointed! I think this book will also appeal to readers who may not think of themselves as sci-fi fans, because it deal with real-life issues like impostor syndrome, friendship breakups, and first love. I will definitely be ordering this one for my school library!

Half Life was a fascinating read. In turns scientific, psychological, and suspenseful. The first half (pun sort of intended) sets us up with a build toward the split/half lives that develop at the midpoint of the novel. Clark probes into how easily a young girl (or, let's face it, anyone) can get stuck in a trap of not feeling good enough, thereby becoming her own worst enemy in her need for human connection. It's all very relatable and I think teen readers (and, let's face it, anyone) will be nodding along to some of the passages, thinking, "Yes! That!" The book truly took off for me though at that midpoint when the two girls were put side by side and we shifted into rapidly unfolding dramatic action. The tension got pulled way up. The themes became more layered. Even the language makes a shift, and I loved the mirror between form and content. We know s**t's hitting the fan and we're a looong way from stasis. There are so many layers to the duality and half-ness of these girls. The ethics. The psychology. The confusion about what to do and be and think. The existentialist crisis of it all. There's also a spectacular level of suspense. What will happen when/if two girls assumed to be one are uncovered as more than two halves of a whole?

For those wondering, there is some romance but it serves to support the character arcs of the two girls rather than becoming the focus of the story. No one in this novel was two dimensional, even--and especially--the girl created from scratch. Throughout the work, Clark weaves her signature wit, giving us banter that helps us feel the bonds that form within families and friendships.

It's a book you'll want to talk to your friends about, and those, I think, are the best kinds of books.