A blend of an Anastasia retelling and I, Robot, Lifel1k3 is a fast-paced sci-fi dystopian. It was totally out of my normal wheelhouse, but I LOVED it! (That's twice that has happened with Jay Kristoff...the first was Aurora Rising.)

The setting is really fun and creepy at the same time--a bit of Thunderdome plus strange segmented city-states. California has become Kalyfornia, which has become the Dregs. It's basically a huge garbage dump and scrap heap. Armada lies across Zona Bay and is built entirely out of a mass of wrecked watercraft. And that's just two locations. The world-building is incredibly unique and amusing.

The characters are full of personality and a lot of fun as well. Eve is a badass who builds robots to fight in a life-sized version of Battle Bots. Cricket is a particularly entertaining sassy--don't call him little--machina, Kaiser is a robot/dog hybrid known as a blitzhund, and Lemon Fresh is a sardonic ball of fire whose name alone makes her intriguing. Add to that some evil science corps, some murderous robots, a gang of religious zealot vigilantes, some dangerous street gangs, and an apparently more than human bounty hunter, and you have yourself a cacophony of crazy.

I loved this book so hard. It read super fast and I ran the gamut of emotions. It's such a crazy hodgepodge. The narrative is action-packed with a seriously mind-blowing ending. Major intrigue still exists and I am grabbing the sequel ASAP!