Book Review: DEV1AT3 by Jay Kristoff

Title: DEV1AT3
Author: Jay Kristoff
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: June 25th, 2019
Rating: 4.8//5

In the wake of a climactic battle in the ruined city of Babel, two former best friends suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of the same quest. Eve is torn between the memories of the girl she was, and the synthetic she’s discovered herself to be. Together with her lifelike “siblings,” Eve sets out to find the real Ana Monrova, whose DNA is the key to building an army of lifelikes. Meanwhile, Eve’s best friend, Lemon, is coming to terms with a power that she has long denied–and that others want to harness as a weapon. When she meets a strange boy named Grimm, he offers to lead her out of the horror-ridden landscape and to an enclave of other abnorms like herself. There, Lemon quickly finds a sense of belonging–and perhaps even love–among the other genetic deviates. But all is not what it seems, and with enemies and friends, heroes and villains wearing interchangeable faces, Lemon, too, will join the race to locate Ana Monrova before her former best friend can get to her.

Welcome to my review of DEV1AT3! (A day late…whoops)

In case it’s not clear, this review WILL contain spoilers for LIFEL1K3.

Can I just say that I love that Jay starts off all his books with a nice recap? Even though I’m binge reading this series, it’s nice to have a lay down of who are characters/organizations are at the beginning.

This story picks up right where LIFEL1K3 ended, with Eve figuring out that she’s not Eve Carpenter, the granddaughter of Silas, and she’s not Ana, the daughter of Nicholas Monrova and Ezekiel’s lost love. She’s actually a lifelike, one that Nicholas created after the original Ana was in a terrible accident, and he didn’t want to lose his precious daughter. Gripping with this new realization, she joins her brothers and sisters in their mission to “free” all machines from human rule, and to do that, they need to find the real Ana.

This story is mostly told from the POV’s of Lemon and Cricket, and I fell more in love with these two than I ever thought possible.

Usually I’m not a big fan of narrator switches in stories, but seeing as Eve and the gang are very repetitive in this story – go to location, cause destruction, see if Ana is there, repeat – I’m glad we weren’t subjected to all that.

Also, Eve is 100% on team bad guys now. But can you even blame her? She’s had TWO identity crisis’s in only a few days time and has zero idea who she really is. I would be one of the bad guys too if I was in her shoes.

Instead we follow Lemon, after we found out that she was the deviate all along, not Eve, she is now on her own once again. Lemon’s gets separated from Ezekiel and is kidnapped by BioMass. These BioMass “people” really freak me out, there’s multiple bodies for one collective “person” who only has one task – one that’s their name and entire identity. So we have “carer”, “hunter”, and a whole bunch of others and they SCARE ME.

But soon Lemon finds more people like her, there’s Grimm, Diesel, Fix, and their leader Major. She finally has a family, a place to belong, but not everything is as great as it seems and the world of Lemon Fresh is just as crazy as ever.

Then there’s my baby Cricket, The not-so-little anymore robot is stuck in New Bethlehem, the epicenter of the Brotherhood, as a bot fighter with his new “owner” Abraham. Abraham has secrets of his own, and I absolutely adore the friendship that develops between these two.

Meanwhile, Ezekiel is looking for both Lemon and Ana, the real Ana. As he races against his brothers and sisters his loyalties are tested even further, and he has to choose a side – and a family – once and for all.

I loved loved loved this book. (It’s honestly so hard to review this series without a million spoilers so it’s a short one). I love how human all the characters are, there’s no line drawn in the sand of “these are good guys, those are bad guys”. Everyone adapts and changes to the situations that they’re forced into, and their loyalties and feelings change.

This story dives a lot more into the world, with the fight between BioMass and Daedalus becoming a little more front and center. War between the lifelikes and the humans, war between the two major corporations struggling to take control, war between friends….

And it wouldn’t be a Kristoff book if it didn’t end with a HUGE CLIFFHANGER…. the bomb is ticking and not everyone will survive….

So, that’s all I got for DEV1AT3, but stay tuned next week as we dive into the final book, and let me just say this finale is probably the best book of the three!