Title: Immortal Beloved (Book One of the Immortal Beloved Trilogy)
Author: Cate Tiernan
ISBN: 9781444707069
© 2010 Gabrielle Charbonet
'After some of the events I've witnessed I felt like I was a shell with nothing alive left in me.
I hadn't been going around killing people, but people were hurt - the memories just kept trickling in like rivulets of fresh acid dripping into my brain until I wanted to scream. It was in my blood, I knew.
A darkness.
The darkness.
I had inherited it, along with my immortality and my black eyes.'
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Finished reading on 11 - 11 - 2024.
I had this pocketbook on my bookshelf for quite a while. I am a fan of fantasy books and the title, cover and back-flap seemed promising; romance and darkness in a fantasy setting. At the time I didn’t know it was the first book of a trilogy. Now I know. And I ordered the two remaining books. They have not been published as e-books, so I will have my set complete on paper.
“Last night my whole world came tumbling down. Now I’m running scared.
Have you ever been going along, living your life, living in your reality, and then suddenly something happens that rips your world right in two? You see something or hear something, and suddenly everything you are, everything you’re doing, shatters into a thousand shards of sharp, bitter realization.
It happened to me last night.”
The main character, Nastasya or in short Nasty, is an immortal, born around 1550 in Iceland. She’s lived her long, long life, using many different names, her original one being Sunna. The last couple of hundred years or so, she’s spent her time with a couple of other immortal friends, being inseparable: Innocencio, Boz, Cicely, Katy and Stratton. On the night the story starts, Incy does something that shocks Nastasya for the first time in a very long time. He uses dark magick to break someone's back and even laughs about it. Nastasya never uses her magick, it makes her literally feel sick, and the reason lies in her past. She’s the last survivor of an original powerful family. Her family was murdered in front of her when she was just a child, and she only survived because her mother’s dead body hid her from view. She has always refrained from using magic, hiding the fact that she’s powerful, for if someone finds out, they might take her power by any means necessary. She’s suddenly afraid of Incy and her friends and decides to run away and disappear.
Somewhere in her past, she’s met a woman, River, also immortal, who offered her a place to stay if she wanted to rest, be away, and maybe learn to be more true to herself. Back then she wasn’t interested at all, but now, she doesn’t know where and who else to turn to, so she decides to take the woman up on her offer, hoping the offer still stands.
And so the story of her self-discovery starts. She’s cranky and sometimes even petty towards others, but that’s been her way of building up walls to protect herself for centuries. Slowly those walls come crumbling down and she’s scared and maybe rightfully so. A shocking part of her past comes right into her present and again she doesn’t know who to trust. River helps her see things from a different perspective, revealing she knows who she is. She herself is even older than Nastasya. She teaches about white magick, about the fact that no one is completely dark or good, that every choice is a new one and that Nastasya can learn to choose between dark and white magick. Everyone has a past and that past is part of who you are, but it doesn’t define who you can be in the future. Even people who have done horrible things in their past can choose to do good. They can’t undo what they have done, but they can choose a different path. Now Nastasya, Sunna, must choose how she wants her future to be.
I liked the book a lot. Sometimes I wanted to kick Nasty for being nasty (well chosen nickname) but as the story unfolds, I came to understand her character and her actions more. I’m curious about the pasts and development of the other characters, River and Reyn for instance.
I don’t know how being immortal works in the way of ageing. Nasty was born immortal, but has grown up to appear to be around her late teens, early twenties, so do they age really slowly? Do they eventually grow to be old and frail while still being immortal, because that would suck. Or is there an age where ageing stops. Maybe this will be explained in the sequel. I’m curious.
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