First off I have to admit that I approached this book as a lay person without any special background in Chemistry or Biology expecting to see something along the lines of a Brief History of Time.
Alas, First Life feels more like a thinly disguised text book and one that was written 20 years too early. First 150 or so pages just lay out the groundwork for the chemistry and are tedious to go through. The prose is like the boring history of magic teacher we all had in Hogwarts. Bunch of people discovering reactions, which to a lay person like me, seem very similar to each other. A big deal is made out of whether basic chemicals needed for life came from space or were synthesized on Earth, but "why" we care is not at all clear. From reading the text, it seems its pretty straightforward for them to be created on earth, and also pretty straightforward for them to be created in space, so lets just get on with the story shall we?
Another problem is that the final chapter of this story is still unwritten, which is why I say the book has been written 20 years too early. The book is basically the Author's proposal for how life started, you get very little context on how well his proposals are accepted by the broader community. The science itself far from approaching an answer, and so the proposal themselves are riddled with contradictions that a lay person like myself can hardly be expected to make sense of. For example, a bunch of necessary chemicals need acidic environment for synthesis, while another bunch of needed elements need alkaline conditions. Both of these chemicals are introduced at different points in the book, and the fact that they both need to appear together for life to start is glossed over.
Author keeps getting back to a piece of meteorite that he analyzed and a volcanic field in Russia that he visited. It gets old pretty quickly. There is only so much you can read about those two incidents. Also bugging are "more about this in Chapter X" where X is half a book away.
I am guessing people who have a background in Chemistry and Biology might find this book more interesting, its not really written for an average Joe.