literary fiction – Pleasant Nights

Title: The Immortalists

Author: Chloe Benjamin

Genre: Literary Fiction

PopSugar Challenge Prompt: A book you’ve seen on someone’s bookshelf (in real life, on a Zoom call, in a TV show, etc)

I really shouldn’t judge a book by its title. I expected this book to be some sort of fantasy book. And it’s just not at all. I really wavered on whether or not I even wanted to read it, based on the title, but I’m so glad I gave it a go because I loved it. The characters are just so great and each one’s story is interesting. And although you don’t spend the entire book with all the characters, they are never far from the story.

From Goodreads: 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.

This book grapples with death a lot. When the kids get their predicted death dates, that knowledge greatly impacts them and how they live their lives. You follow one of the four kids at a time, but they weave in and out of each others’ stories that it feels like they are all in the same story together. I am so glad I read this one. I can’t say it was heart-warming, but the plot was interesting, and I was captivated by how the characters were so individually written and portrayed. I will definitely be thinking about them for quite awhile.

The Vanishing Half

Title: The Vanishing Half

Author: Brit Bennet

Genre: Black and African American literary fiction

Books like this one are always on my radar, but I don’t make them a priority to get to. I’m just so stuck in my horror/dystopian/thriller genres of choice that I don’t always get to literary fiction like I mean to. But I’ve been doing better about putting these kinds of books on hold and then reading them once the library sends them to my kindle. And I am so thankful I did. What an amazing book!

From Goodreads: The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

This book was really character-driven, and said characters were just perfect. The twins, Stella and Desiree, are so different from each other, and their lives diverge so much. Stella, passing as white, never seems happy, always looking over her shoulder, expecting her truth to be revealed. The story is told in chunks of time, not only about the twins, but also their children. Jude is Desiree’s daughter Kennedy is Stella’s. Jude is also trying to escape her past and figure out who she is. Kennedy is doing the same but for many different reasons. Don’t get me wrong; there is a plot, of course. But these women jump right off the page and take control. I couldn’t get enough of their stories and understand why everyone raves about this book.