Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > Reluctant Immortals

“... it’s something I finally learned, though it took me years to figure it out: how a girl should never be the one to blame for the lies of men.”

I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for genre fiction filled with lyrical prose. It’s my sweet spot where books are concerned: the loveliest of writing in a genre package. Don’t get me wrong: I love literary fiction with all its purity, but I’m just a sucker for the beautiful wrapped in the flashy. I fall right into this trap all the time. It certainly helps that the flashy part of this book is sharp, interesting, and absolutely impossible to put down.

While not an absolutely original premise (genre fiction is built on the shoulders of the books that have come before it), I absolutely loved the premise of Lucy and Bertha trying to live out their reluctantly immortals lives in hiding (and in another case, imprisoning and protecting the world from) the two monsters who ruined their entire existences. They aren’t truly happy, but they aren’t exactly miserable either, having found one another decades prior to the book and being one another’s family in every manner but blood. But they are bored, stuck in a loop of doing the same thing day in and day out as they have for years and years. It’s no way to live, but dying a final death isn’t exactly a choice for them. Not with all that’s at stake (pun not intended).

An aspect of this book that took me some time to catch onto (but I was so tickled when I did catch on because it made me swoon in my literature analysis heart) was how so many things that Lucy and Bee come across in this book are dying: the H in the Hollywood sign is wobbling, their house is suffering from decay (as is their car), the drive-in they’ve been going to for years is going to go out of business, the owner of that business is old and close to the end of his life, the gas station they come across on their road trip is old and falling apart, San Francisco may be a new city to them, but hippies are crammed into old houses that are falling apart and they are all falling apart and not living in a state of reality. An amusement park Lucy hides in is falling apart at the seams, more horror than family fun. And innocent girls looking for answers are looking for them in the arms and minds of monstrous men instead of within themselves.

There are scenes and sentences in this book that I read twice or three times simply for the pure beauty of them. It’s times like this that I really hate the stigma against genre literature by the hoity-toity lit snobs in the world. Turning your nose up at books like this doesn’t make you a “better” or “more intelligent” reader, just like it doesn’t make me in any way lesser for having read it and loved it. It’s a beautiful book filled with fabulous sentence structure and a perfectly shaped plot.

Thanks to NetGalley and Gallery/Saga Press for granting me access to this book.