Monday Muses: The Immortalist

For this months book club we read The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin. I have to admit I really struggled with this book. There is something about the writing style that just doesn’t jive with me. The story was broken up into points of view of each of the characters, and as a whole depicted how each character’s actions affected the other. For me, there was no real climax or real closure for the final character. We can only speculate what happens. That being said, I think there was a real good lesson on living life with earnest. Seeing life as a gift to experience at its fullest.

The book begins in the late 1960’s when a fortune teller tells four siblings their dates they would die. How would it affect your life? This is what the four Gold children do and we follow them through the years after this incident.

The two youngest, Simon and Kharla, leave for San Francisco before Simon is of legal age to follow their dreams. We follow both of their experiences, Simon as a club dancer and Kharla as a magician. While the two older siblings are back at home with their mother, leading more ordinary lives than their siblings. But are they really just ordinary lives? Once told the date of your death, would you ever forget it?

One has to wonder how much the characters knowing when they would die affected their life choices and whether or not they died because of it?