Review: The Other Side of Life

Anya and Leticia are human thieves, who work returning valuable artifacts to their rightful owners; Nin is the leader of a small band of cyberpunk elves, working to subvert the social order, save the environment, and defeat a few bad guys.  Nin convinces Anya and Leticia to help him out with a job - a simple heist.  But none of them could possibly guess what they're in for...


Entertainment: ★★★


I enjoyed The Other Side of Life; I thought it was a fun, light read.


Plot: ★★★


It was fast-paced and exciting.  It did lean a little towards the cheesy at times but the adrenaline mostly made up for that.

Characters: ★★★★

I thought the characters in and of themselves were quite interesting.  I'm always a sucker for those theives-and-rogues-with-hearts-of-gold types.  I also liked how the villain actually had a reason for doing bad stuff, not just "because I'm evil like that."  However, I was a little less thrilled about the relationships between the characters.  Their interactions just didn't make sense.  This one paragraph stood out to me:


“Great!”” Nin gave her a quick hug, his heart singing the praises of the good nature she extended to him. Anya was a little taken aback to admit (to herself) that it somehow felt so right being in his arms, even if it was for a short while.


Keep in mind, this is just a few pages after they've met for the first time.  By all rights they shouldn't even be trusting each other not to stab each other in the back, much less hugging their way to a romantic happily ever after.  It was just confusing.  Relationships just cropped up out of the blue without much development, as did emotions and trust and things like that.  I think a little more exploration of inter-character interactions would've improved the book hugely.  But like I said, on their own, each character was individually pretty interesting.  So it kind of balanced out for me.


Writing: ★★


It wasn't bad, but there was just way too much tell and not nearly enough show for me, particularly in Nin and Anya's relationship.


End Result: three stars.  A decent book, but not amazingly excellent.