Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


It’s a bestseller for a reason!

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

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If you knew the day you would die, how would that change the way you live? Chloe Benjamin explores this idea in her second novel about four siblings who, in New York in 1969, learn just that. Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya sneak off to see a fortune teller whose gift is knowing your death date. After they each learn how long they’ll live, we hear about their separate stories. At 17, Simon leaves New York for San Francisco with his sister Klara, who is […]

Manipulated Into Caring

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

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For a tale of four siblings bound together by a traumatic experience with a fortune teller when they were young, The Immortalists is not terribly enthralling. Varya, Simon, Klara, and Daniel, the siblings, meet an old woman in a cramped and hot apartment. They have saved up and pooled their allowance; they overheard other kids in the neighborhood saying that “the woman on Hester Street” could tell you the date of your death. She gives gives our fearless foursome their dates; they do not share them with […]

The Immortalists

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

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The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin is the story of four siblings, Varya, Daniel, Klara and Simon Gold. On a hot summer day in 1969, the four pay a visit to a woman who can tell them when they will die. Each sibling must come to terms with the knowledge in their own way and each faces the question of whether that knowledge informs the way they live. Complicating each of their lives is their relationships to each other and their parents, Gertie and Saul. Those […]

Nothing more than a conjuror of cheap tricks

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How would you live your life if you knew when you were going to die? That’s the high-concept idea behind Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists, which opens in 1969 Brooklyn with the four Gold children, aged 7 to 13, visiting a fortune teller who gives each the exact date of his or her death. Three of the four are upset by their predictions, and each reacts differently in the following years.  Simon leaves home at 16 and follows his sister to San Francisco where he can […]

“The Power of Words […] They Hooked into Invididuals and Wormed Through Generations.”

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I am but one of a number of Cannonballers who have read The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin so far this year! And for the most part I enjoyed it, as I know some others did. Though I think the front half really got me more so than the latter half, which is not to say that things don’t all come together and create a beautiful story, but I think it really boils down to feeling more of a connection with some of the characters whose […]

A lively book about death

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Yeah, I don’t think I would want to know when I would die. This book chronicles the story of the four Gold children, raised in New York City, who are quite young when they hear from somebody who heard from somebody that there’s a witch woman who can tell you the precise day when you will die. Being children – especially being a group of children, always another one there to egg you on – they visit her and, one by one, come out … […]



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