![]() ![]() ![]() When expectations are high, well, expectations are high. Was she simply too young to handle the emotional potential of this story? She does suffer the curse of pre-pub hype. But that’s me, and I am not the author of this book.Ĭhloe Benjamin is 28. ![]() Granted, I’m not wild about magic or moneys. Still, the siblings’ connection felt remote to me. Only at the end do we learn, in hindsight, how each of the siblings think of each other. We have four separate stories here, one for each of the children who learns his fate. A good editor might have pared these down. But the question is lost in a morass of homework details. ![]() And yes, this book does raise the interesting issue of whether we are the cause or the result of our fate. She also does her homework - on sleight of hand, on gay life in San Francisco in the time of AIDS, on monkey behavior. Benjamin’s prose, which is clean, fresh, and vivid in its simplicity. So that is a positive, this unusual premise. The story describes how this knowledge directs their lives. The premise is intriguing: Four siblings, age 7 to 13, visit a fortuneteller who tells each the date her or she will die. “The Immortalists” is her sophomore effort, and while I didn’t read her first book, this one was so roundly mentioned as one of the must-reads of 2018 that I couldn’t resist. Chloe Benjamin is a young, new voice in fiction. ![]()
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