Lin's Perspective

This is a story of a boy who meets a girl and they fall in love but with a twist. The setting is somewhere in the near future or in a parallel universe to ours, where people at any time in their lives can get an inexplicable seizure, which marks the countdown of their death because they’ve reached their half-life. If you get a seizure at 2 yo at 4 yo, you’d be dead, and there is nothing you can do about it. There is no cure, there is no explanation just something turns off the light, and that’s it puff you are gone just like that.

Our main characters, Flint and September, are teenagers in their prime who are yet to be swallowed by a tsunami of emotions. Each of them is going through their own hardship, and in my view, Flint’s character is very well developed. I found the book’s premise compelling. Hence, I expected it to tug at my heartstrings, but the truth of the matter is that it did not…

What I liked was the easy flow of the writing, I also very much appreciated the diversity in the side characters and the depiction of grief, the feelings that came with knowing your death day and the realisation of all the things and people you would leave behind… The emotions are raw, conflicting, and confusing. It makes you wonder what you would have done if you were in Flint’s or Tember’s place and how you would have reacted in a certain situation. Also, the idea of the half-life death was really intriguing, and I personally wanted it to be more of just the sad, soppy romance it turned out to be.

Right, I knew it would have been a romance, and I was all there for it. However, it felt flat; there were some plot holes here and there. I expected more of the so brilliant-minded September, who works in the half-life institute as an intern and is trying to solve the mystery and find a cure for these sudden and untimely deaths. But everything happened in the last few chapters, and it was rushed, and some things did not click well together for me personally.

Again, I loved Flint’s character, I wish we had seen more of the relationship between him and his parents as well as Semptember’s parents, something there felt left unsolved. I wished there was more about the half-life theory instead of the romance, and frankly, some of it was completely unnecessary and could have been left out to the presumption of what is going on to make space for the actual plot of finding a cure, which I thought was the whole point of the book… But I digress.

Anyway, I did enjoy the story and gave it 3 stars at the end.