Immortal Longings - Chloe Gong



Thanks to NetGalley and publisher for this eArc!

This is, you guessed it, a first volume. In here you follow Calla, Anton and August in a chaotic city plagued by poverty. Calla and Anton enter an annual game in which the winner is the last one standing (alive). Both of them have a very personnal reason to win and they will form a tentative alliance in order to kill the competition.
It is a story full of politics, betrayals, murder, conspiracies and complicated relationships.

I was very curious to read Chloe Gong but her previous series didn't tempt me as I'm not really fond of mafia related stories. This is her adult debut and I really liked it!

At the beginning I had a hard time understanding the worldbuilding, the magic and the politics at the same time but I was immediately engrossed by Calla's motivations that seemed so naïve to me. How killing the king without a plan for the aftermath will change anything in the politics of the empire??

I'll never understand societies where massacres are considered as nice entertainments. In Hunger Games, at least it was more understandable as the kids killing each other were not from the Capitol where the people enjoyed the games. The districts were not happy to watch their kids being killed. But here, anyone from the city can ask to participate (this, I get. It's dispair that pushes people to want in in the games), the games take place in the city and people like watching that??

The magic system was really fascinating: people can jump from their bodies to another. I didn't really get what the rules were, but it was very interesting to see that people didn't have a strong connection to their bodies because of that. So I have a lot of questions about gender identity, sexual orientation and physical attraction, and how it is all perceived, and I hope we'll see more about that in the sequel. We've already seen that Anton doesn't really care what body he inhabits, but when he is with Calla, he is always in a male body.

And actually, about the relationship between Calla and Anton, which is supposed to be a retelling of Anthony and Cleopatra, it fell a little flat to me because it went from 0 to 10 in a paragraph (and Calla was very emo about it which felt pretty strange to me).

The end of the games left me crying then gasping, and the chapter with the girl in the coma was...wow but it kind of broke the flow of the story.

Rep: saphic couple in the background, genderfluidity?
TW: blood, murders, parenticide, extreme poverty, betrayals, physical violence
 

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