The Immortalists - Chloe Benjamin [Book Review]

Book - The Immortalists
Author - Chloe Benjamin
Genre - Literary Fiction
Year Published - 2018

Does knowing about your death change the way you live your life?

☆☆☆

The Immortalists regales the story of four siblings: Daniel, the stoic oldest brother; Klara, the rebellious magician; Simon, the repressed youngest child and Varya, the pragmatist who seek out a fortune teller in 1969 and the fortune teller tells the children individually the exact dates they are going to die. The novel follows the story of each sibling - with their wildly different personalities - how they live knowing full well exactly when they are going to die. The major question the novel asks is whether it was fate that led the children to their prophesied demise or did they self-fulfill the prophesy.
The story-telling is rivetting, all the Gold children are super interesting, their disparate goals and lifestyles fun to read about (except the death part). The book is divided into sections, each one following different siblings. The first section is about Simon, who is to die at the age of 22 according to the prophesy. He goes to California and decides to make some risky choices and later contracts AIDS because of them and meets his demise on the prophesied date. Likewise, the theme of whether they were destined to die or was is their choices that self-fulfilled the prophesy is recurrent with every sibling hereon after. Despite not believing the prophesy, it still affects how they live their lives.
The book is an easy read, the pacing quick, the premise interesting nothing I can complain about those though I still felt up until the last page that this book was going to give me an answer stringing the siblings' death together through something - be it science or the supernatural or something. I found the ending provided by the author very lacking and misleading altogether, especially after the first chapter about the gypsy seer.