That said, I would read Chloe Benjamin again simply for the sake of her prose. Benjamin intended those characters to be.

Her male voices (and there were many) sounded spiteful and bratty. Here, though, the narrator was a distraction. I’ve loved certain narrators, have listened to books where they make the story, and I’ve told you all that. Sadly, the narrator of the audiobook wasn’t a help. in fiction at the University of Wisconsin. She is a graduate of Vassar College and the M.F.A. Her first novel, The Anatomy of Dreams, received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was long listed for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. When expectations are high, well, expectations are high. Chloe Benjamin is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Immortalists. 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.

The immortalists author