The Immortalists
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I started out completely mesmerized by The Immortalists; I couldn’t put it down. It begins with a compelling premise: four siblings go to a psychic woman who tells them their exact dates of death. Then, the book immediately splits into four separate sections that focus on the life of each child, which may or may not end in their foretold death (that’s for me to know and you to find out baby!)
Unfortunately, the farther I got, the more my interest waned. Some of the siblings are more inherently interesting than others, although I’ll give the author, Chloe Benjamin, credit for creating four very distinct characters. One of them (Daniel) is super bland, and that’s where my attention said byeeeeeee. He’s like if the color beige was a person. Also, what started out as a unique predicament– trying to live with the knowledge of your death– became either formulaic or cheesy when spun over and over.
I was so genuinely invested in the beginning! I even cried IRL when something bad happened and then unsuccessfully tried to pretend that I had simply yawned. But as I continued reading, and the details of this dysfunctional family continued to play out, I wasn’t convinced about their dynamic. It seemed stilted and their interactions were either uninteresting or underexplored. Oddly enough, the more I read about each of them, the less I felt I truly got to know them. Perhaps it was too ambitious to fully follow four lives? Perhaps that alliteration was too ambitious? Regardless, what started out as a 5-flamer petered out to 3 out of 5 flames.
