Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Publishing, 2018
Pages: 352
Rating: Do Not Recommend
Synopsis: If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?
It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.
The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.
A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.
Review: The Immortalists isn't a novel I would choose on my own and I thought I was straying into something that would be compelling and fresh. I saw it on several must-read or to-read book lists of 2018. It's not deserving of all the hype. An interesting premise, perhaps, but a complete failure to deliver.
The characters were unlikable and Benjamin wasn't able to bring them to life. Each remained flat, self-absorbed, and unchanged. Each character's demise or conclusion was predictable and unimaginative. It's rare that I would call a book boring, but that's exactly what this was.
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