I didn’t love everything about The Immortalists, but I found it powerful in parts, and especially at the end. After giving it some thought, I’m comfortable with a 4 star rating.
The book focuses on four siblings. At the beginning, as children and young teens growing up in Manhattan, they visit a fortune teller who tells them separately and secretly the date they will each die. The rest of the book is broken into four parts, each part focusing on one sibling. It’s not so much about whether the prediction is true or not, but about how the prediction affects how they live their lives.
In a way, it’s a concept book. How would you live your life if there was a chance you knew the date of your death? But there’s a lot more to the tale Benjamin weaves. These are complex troubled characters - affected by their time in history, their family background and their ties with each other. At times, I found that Benjamin pushed the internal and interpersonal drama a bit too far, but I still wanted to keep reading. And I’m glad I did because the end is perfect.
Some reviewers seem to be turned off by early graphic sex scenes. It’s a very small part of the book — and in my view a necessary part of the story at that point — so it shouldn’t deter anyone from reading further. (As an addendum, I should add that toward the end there are a few scenes that may be disturbing to people who have trouble reading about animals being mistreated -- they're not exploitative, but they may be hard to read.)
The book focuses on four siblings. At the beginning, as children and young teens growing up in Manhattan, they visit a fortune teller who tells them separately and secretly the date they will each die. The rest of the book is broken into four parts, each part focusing on one sibling. It’s not so much about whether the prediction is true or not, but about how the prediction affects how they live their lives.
In a way, it’s a concept book. How would you live your life if there was a chance you knew the date of your death? But there’s a lot more to the tale Benjamin weaves. These are complex troubled characters - affected by their time in history, their family background and their ties with each other. At times, I found that Benjamin pushed the internal and interpersonal drama a bit too far, but I still wanted to keep reading. And I’m glad I did because the end is perfect.
Some reviewers seem to be turned off by early graphic sex scenes. It’s a very small part of the book — and in my view a necessary part of the story at that point — so it shouldn’t deter anyone from reading further. (As an addendum, I should add that toward the end there are a few scenes that may be disturbing to people who have trouble reading about animals being mistreated -- they're not exploitative, but they may be hard to read.)