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boltlightning 's review for:
Immortal Longings
by Chloe Gong
i think the comparison to antony and cleopatra harms this book more than it helps it. the groundwork for the ideas is there—it's antony and cleopatra in the hunger games! there's something to be said about that level of publicity, that constant need to present yourself for the cameras, in order to stay alive, that can be related back to the shakespeare play: the two leads are constantly judged and doubted by their peers for their relationship, and it throws all their actions into doubt. certainly that would come into play in immortal longings right? right??
reader. i'm afraid to say that calla and anton bear a passing resemblance to the third pillar of the world and the strumpet for whom he is a fool.
like. i don't know. i don't think any author doing one of these retellings should be beholden to the source materials; for thousands of years of human history we have iterated on the stories we love. but it is worse to have the comparison to shakespeare in this instance.
reader. i'm afraid to say that calla and anton bear a passing resemblance to the third pillar of the world and the strumpet for whom he is a fool.
like. i don't know. i don't think any author doing one of these retellings should be beholden to the source materials; for thousands of years of human history we have iterated on the stories we love. but it is worse to have the comparison to shakespeare in this instance.
calla is nothing like cleopatra, either in shakespeare's play or her historical precedent. calla very rarely solves problems with diplomacy or wit; she is almost always solving problems with a sword. she has none of the characteristic mercurial behaviors that make her such an icon among one of shakespeare's weaker works. calla is a fine character, but when you are looking for comparisons to cleopatra, she falls flat. the book opens with the famous she makes hungry where most she satisfies passage, but i would be hard-pressed to define a single time calla acted so.
and anton, i fear, is not really interesting enough to warrant the comparison to antony. he has very weak motivation, superficial connection to calla, and a personality that gets completely lost in the snarky dialogue that everyone seems to share. anton was such a missed opportunity it genuinely makes me sad—he mentions offhand in his first chapter that he sometimes jumps into female bodies, and that's such a fascinating thing i wish had been explored. antony's identity is constantly shifting in the play, and he is often emasculated by his relationship with cleopatra. isn't a world where you can be any gender the perfect place to explore those feelings? to challenge the gender roles that so define antony and cleopatra, both within the play and without?
unfortunately not. immortal longings has many ideas that are really interesting, but are never explored in full. this is an adult novel that refuses to engage with its own premise beyond a surface level, which is so frustrating!
you see it everywhere. there's just no coherent explanation for so many of the genre conventions. the most glaring of these issues is the entire premise of the games themselves, which are explained with caveats all the way through the book. it's the hunger games, but set through the whole city! the combatants will explicitly take the bodies of the downtrodden people living in the slums and kill each other in them :) but don't worry all those downtrodden people loooove to watch the games and are even rooting for certain competitors! i understand the compulsion to write a crapsack world, but my god, even a crapsack world needs to operate on some sort of internal logic.
everything about this is fucked up. everything about jumping is fucked up. it's all so fucked up, but it's fucked up in a way that COULD be a phenomenal contradiction if the novel made any effort to engage with it at all. any reflection that calla has—on her own naivete, on her paper-thin motivation of killing the king to fix the entire kingdom—is immediately swept aside. suzanne collins keeps writing books about how we shouldn't think the hunger games are cool and we're still doing this.
i also just want to say i sighed out loud reading the names pampi magnes and otta avia. please just change the names to something completely different. i'm begging you.
anyway. i'm done. i don't have a tiktok or instagram and so i haven't been following this author, but as i was looking up this book to see if other people feel the same, i learned that this book was maybe not written in the best of creative circumstances. all my love to chloe gong; i think this just needed a few more years in the oven. the second star is for mao mao the cat.
and anton, i fear, is not really interesting enough to warrant the comparison to antony. he has very weak motivation, superficial connection to calla, and a personality that gets completely lost in the snarky dialogue that everyone seems to share. anton was such a missed opportunity it genuinely makes me sad—he mentions offhand in his first chapter that he sometimes jumps into female bodies, and that's such a fascinating thing i wish had been explored. antony's identity is constantly shifting in the play, and he is often emasculated by his relationship with cleopatra. isn't a world where you can be any gender the perfect place to explore those feelings? to challenge the gender roles that so define antony and cleopatra, both within the play and without?
unfortunately not. immortal longings has many ideas that are really interesting, but are never explored in full. this is an adult novel that refuses to engage with its own premise beyond a surface level, which is so frustrating!
you see it everywhere. there's just no coherent explanation for so many of the genre conventions. the most glaring of these issues is the entire premise of the games themselves, which are explained with caveats all the way through the book. it's the hunger games, but set through the whole city! the combatants will explicitly take the bodies of the downtrodden people living in the slums and kill each other in them :) but don't worry all those downtrodden people loooove to watch the games and are even rooting for certain competitors! i understand the compulsion to write a crapsack world, but my god, even a crapsack world needs to operate on some sort of internal logic.
everything about this is fucked up. everything about jumping is fucked up. it's all so fucked up, but it's fucked up in a way that COULD be a phenomenal contradiction if the novel made any effort to engage with it at all. any reflection that calla has—on her own naivete, on her paper-thin motivation of killing the king to fix the entire kingdom—is immediately swept aside. suzanne collins keeps writing books about how we shouldn't think the hunger games are cool and we're still doing this.
i also just want to say i sighed out loud reading the names pampi magnes and otta avia. please just change the names to something completely different. i'm begging you.
anyway. i'm done. i don't have a tiktok or instagram and so i haven't been following this author, but as i was looking up this book to see if other people feel the same, i learned that this book was maybe not written in the best of creative circumstances. all my love to chloe gong; i think this just needed a few more years in the oven. the second star is for mao mao the cat.