Why a Booktrail?
1969: A story about how we live, how we die, and what we do with the time we have.
The Immortalists
What you need to know before your trail
In New York’s Lower East Side, there is a travelling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the date they will die. The four Gold children, too young for what they’re about to hear, sneak out to learn their fortunes.
Over the years that follow, the siblings must choose how to live with the prophecies the fortune-teller gave them that day. Will they accept, ignore, cheat or defy them? Golden-boy Simon escapes to San Francisco, searching for love; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician; eldest son Daniel tries to control fate as an army doctor after 9/11; and bookish Varya looks to science for the answers she craves.
Locations
Reset- America/ USA - New York
- A: Hester St
- B: 72 Clinton St
- C: Theodore Roosevelt Park
- San Francisco
- D: The Castro Theatre
- E: Collingwood St
- F: Ballet Academy
- Las Vegas
- G: King's Row RV Las Vegas
- H: The Mirage
Travel Guide
New York
The Immortalists
The novel opens here with The Woman of Hester street. Golds Tailor and Dressmaking is here. Only a short walk to Clinton Street where the children live. The city is hot and humid and their dresses and shirts stick to their bodies
this is a summer which is happening to everyone apart from them they say – there are concerts and a sense of flower power and dancing, riots and even walking on the moon but they either too young to either watch or join in.
The residents of 72 Clinton Street come from all four corners of the globe – Lev for example escaped the pogroms with his family before moving via Ellis Island and working to build the shop. New York is their past and their future is waiting behind the door of 54 Hester Street it would seem…
San Francisco
The place Simon has dreamed of for years. Situated on the corner of 17th and Market street, The Castro Theater, the men sitting on fires escapes and wearing flannel shirts it’s as if his life is beginning and his future is waiting for him.
San Francisco is freedom – cab rides at night, bottles of whatever you want and free love. Dancing on tables on bars, gay bars and gay sex anywhere and anywhere. “Simon is insulated from the global recession and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan”
Las Vegas
Klara works at the mirage – now this is the home of magic and illusion where nothing is what it seems either in real life or within the theatres
“Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate reality is.”
Locations such as Chicago, Illinois, Ohio form a passing journey in the latter half of the novel and many more towns and townships besides. The settings are fleeting but the message runs clear throughout – The message that “magic is one tool among many for keeping one another alive”
Streetview Maps
A) NYC - Hester Street - The Gold's Tailor shop
B) NYC - 52 Clinton Street
D) San Francisco - The Castro Theatre
Las Vegas - The Mirage
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
This is a special read – one filled with magic and the age old question of what you would do, how you would live if you knew the date you were going to die.
The premise actually made me feel uncomfortable at first as I’ve lost family members at an early age and have always thought about this question in some way.
The setting and time of the story are part of the appeal – San Francisco, New York in the 1960s with a travelling fortune teller and four children who go visit her for a laugh one summer. Their lives after that however are never the same again – imagine if you had done the same thing and one moment of childhood innocence were to have such an effect on the here and now?
There’s a lot of insight and wonder at the purpose of magic in our world:
“Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate reality is.”
It’s a very thought provoking book and whilst there are some sections I thought veered of course a bit, the overall novel and ending was something that I’ll be thinking about for a long while to come.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Immortalists
Destination: New York City, San Francisco, Las Vegas, USA Author/Guide: Chloe Benjamin Departure Time: 1960s onwards
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