Nine by Zach Hines
In an alternate world startlingly close to our own, humans have nine lives—and they can’t wait to burn straight through them.
As you shed lives, you shed your awkward phases: one death is equal to one physical and mental upgrade. Julian’s friends are obsessed with the idea of burning lives, but Julian is determined to stay on his first for as long as he can. His mother, the ultimate cautionary tale, burned through her first eight in just a few years, and Julian has no intention of succumbing to the debilitating rebirth sickness that she inflicted on herself.
But the regime has death incentives aimed at controlling overpopulation, and Julian realizes that he’s going to have to burn at some point—especially when he becomes a target for Nicholas, the manipulative leader of the Burners, the school’s suicide club. And when Julian eventually succumbs, he uncovers suspicious gaps in the rebirth system that may explain exactly why his mother went so far down the rabbit hole years ago. Along with a group of student dissenters, Julian sets out to find answers and is soon on the verge of exposing the greatest conspiracy ever unleashed on the world.
He has just eight more lives to uncover the brutal truth.
Rating:
The concept of this book intrigued me very much, and I knew it may not be a “popular” book that everyone wanted to read, but it definitely had me at the premise.
What would I do with 9 lives, and also, how do you cope with rebirth? How do people come back to life? There were so many questions. So many of them. And some never got answered, however, one things this book did was a great world bulding (not that it shows itself like a word vomit, thankfully) and it gave you information as you needed (not exactly when you wanted it, but it was worth waiting to find out how they were reborn, what happened as you died.
There was also a lot of intersting characters, and it posed a question on suicide and death.
And population control, as the goverment gives economical incentives for families to reach a certain “lives expended” quotient so that they can earn more or get better jobs/promotions, or better homes/neighbourhoods. And it was interesting to see how it had been posed in this book and made me wonder if we had those lives how it would be controlled.
I think I would’ve been one of those that stayed at her first life for as long as possible as the panicky anxious part of me would think “but what if someone runs me over? or a fire happens? I may loose a life then and what if I was already on my 8th or something like that?”
All in all it was a much creepier read than I expected it to be, but it was also extremely interesting and it kept me hooked.
Moon recommends
Read Nine for a spooky creepy look at life that will keep you on the edge of your seat. A book that kept comign to mind as read this was Scythe which treats the whole “immortality” in a different way but also ponders what humanity does when death isn’t somethign that happens in the same way it used to.
