Author: Fives @ Down The Rabbit Hole

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.

A flying demon feeding on human energies.

A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down.

And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.

The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.

She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

This was one suggested by a friend, whom I had never taken a suggestion from previously. I’m glad I was sold by their description of this book though, because it was truly a good one! Based on the story of King Arthur, it is not a retelling, but it is definitely based on that old mythology and story. I was always a mythology buff, so this one already had a great start in my eyes.

Legendborn revolves around our protagonist, Brianna “Bree” Matthews, who is just beginning to attend her specialized program at “pre-college,” after a tragic accident resulting in the death of her mother. However, not all is as it seems at this school, when Bree realizes she can see things other people can’t seem to, and she is quickly dragged into a secret society world, a little bit reminiscent of Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House. I always like a school-related world building magic world, and this one did not fall short for me either.

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 is one of those books I saw at a bookstore, and seemed really interesting, so I instantly went to go to the library to go borrow and read it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite what I expected, but I think in the end it was still an interesting read.

The Immortalists has an interesting premise. There is a lady who can tell you the exact date of your death. What happens to your life after you know this date? And is the lady even telling the truth or just a fraud? This is the conundrum that the Gold children face after meeting the woman one fateful day as kids. Each child grows up with the weight of their upcoming death on their shoulders, and develop in different ways armed with this knowledge. Just how is one’s life affected by this knowledge?