Book Review and Giveaway: Life First by R.J. Crayton (Series, #1)
Summary:
Strong-willed Kelsey Reed must escape tonight or tomorrow her government will take her kidney and give it to someone else.
In this future forged by survivors of pandemics that wiped out 80 percent of the world’s population, life is valued above all else. The government of “Life First” requires the mentally ill to be sterilized, outlaws abortions and sentences to death those who refuse to donate an organ when told.
Determined not to give up her kidney, Kelsey enlists the help of her boyfriend Luke and a dodgy doctor to escape. The trio must disable the tracking chip in her arm for her to flee undetected. If they fail, Kelsey will be stripped of everything.
Review:
I have a confession to make. I was supposed to review this in 2016 but somehow my review copy never made it onto my Kindle or my 2016 ARCs folder. It was only when I was cross-posting to last year’s Accepted ARCs post that I saw it listed and wondered what had happened to it. Apparently it got hung up somehow in the cloud instead of ever delivering to my kindle. My apologies to the author for the delay but I must say the timing of reading it was rather impeccable. With new threats to the bodily autonomy of women coming in 2017 I found the dystopian future to be even more haunting than I might have in 2016.
Set in a near-future where the population was decimated by plagues and environmental issues leading to starvation, the title alludes to a new movement and indeed, rule of law, in the United States. In a landmark case, a woman who after the population decimation chose to have an abortion is prosecuted in court. Her defense is that you wouldn’t force someone to donate blood or a body part to save another person’s life so why should you force a woman to bring a fetus to term? The court agrees that it is a logical fallacy but instead of protecting abortion chooses to make it the law to donate body parts and blood when needed. (There are other impacts too, such as everyone must take statistics classes and decide whether or not to risk their life to save another’s based on the statistical likelihood of success). Everyone is given a life monitoring chip and is registered in a database and bodily matches found so they may be called in when needed. The main character is called in as a kidney donor, but she’s afraid to donate since one of her best friends became paralyzed as a result of her donor surgery.
Those who disagree with this policy have seceded to their own country in what used to be Florida. Kelsey and her boyfriend Luke plan her escape there but of course, not everything goes as planned. There are a lot of twists and turns that bring forth more moral issues that I can’t really get into without spoiling the book for others. Suffice to say, I work as a medical librarian, and I found the medical ethics issues raised on top of the bodily autonomy ones to be quite well-put and thought-provoking.
I must give a quick trigger warning that there is a graphic attempted rape in the book, which was definitely disturbing and not possible to simply skip over, as it was a key plot point and lasted for a while. However, I do think that it suited the book and the issues being raised and was not out-of-place. Essentially, if you’re disturbed by the attempted rape and not by the rest of the book then I have some questions for you about your ethical lines.
Overall, this was an engaging read that left me immediately curious about the next entry in the series. Twists and turns took it places I wasn’t anticipating it going and I encountered more medical ethics issues than I thought I would in the read. Highly recommended, particularly to those who have enjoyed other women’s issues dystopian futures such as The Handmaid’s Tale.
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 262 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: kindle copy from author in exchange for honest review
Giveaway!
This giveaway is now over. Congrats to our winner!
There was 1 entry via blog comment, so she is our winner. Congrats to Amanda McNeill!
Thanks to the generosity of the author, one lucky Opinions of a Wolf reader can win a copy of this ebook.
How to Enter:
- Leave a comment on this post stating why bodily autonomy matters to you.
- Copy/paste the following and tweet it from your public twitter. Retweets do not count:
Enter to win LIFE FIRST by @RJCrayton, hosted by @McNeilAuthor http://buff.ly/2kgFf4F #scifi #womenauthors #giveaway - Repost the Instagram giveaway announcement and tag my Instagram.
- Tag one of your friends on the Instagram giveaway announcement.
Each option gets you one entry. Multiple tweets/Instagram posts do not count as multiple entries.
Who Can Enter: International
Contest Ends: February 23rd at midnight
Disclaimer: The winner will have their book sent to them by the author. The blogger is not responsible for sending the book. Void where prohibited by law.
This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Opinions of a Wolf 
This could be a preview of how dark the political climate could become in the nation. As I have two corneal transplants I can say that bodily anatomy is important to me. Two persons chose (or perhaps their respective families chose) to donate organs. On my drivers license, I have chosen to be an organ donor. The Dalai Lama says our primary purpose in this life is to help others, and if we can’t help them, at least we shouldn’t hurt them. Organ donation should be a choice. However, should it be mandated? I read one’s man’s suggestion that a person is automatically an organ donor unless that he or she indicates otherwise (I.e. on one’s license) that he or she prefers not to be a donor. I would be able to see without the transplants, however I would not be able to drive. I would have to read large print books. My quality of life would not be what it is now.
As far as 80% of the population being decimated…let’s be realistic. Would that be such a bad thing? What was the name of Dan Brown’s book in which a plague was released that rendered some of the population sterile? Last week one of my clients was bemoaning the fact that people aren’t having as many children as they used to. I told her it was good that people aren’t having children they can’t afford. Her husband agreed. She disputed that. She claimed people need to have children to teach them (the children) their (the parents) beliefs. Frightening. But then she’s 86, conservative, and guess who she voted for.
I will be 65 next month. Some of the thing I’ve seen are scary. Truly, the human race could do a lot better.