Immortal Beloved

Gr 10 Up—Nastasya, an immortal, has lived many lifetimes and experienced great wealth, poverty, love, loss, and grief in the first title (Little, Brown, 2010) in a projected trilogy by Cate Tiernan. For the last 100 of her more than 400 years, she has been living the life of a wealthy, hard-partying young woman, numb to the events and the people around her. All this changes after she watches her best friend, Incy, use dark magic to break a man's back in response to a perceived slight offense. To make matters worse, Incy enjoys being cruel. Something Nastasya senses in her friend scares her enough to send her running far away. She finds a safe haven at an organic farm community of other immortals run by River. It is here that that Nastasya meets aloof, handsome Reyn, a man who is curiously familiar and to whom she is attracted. Reyn, it turns out, is linked to her present and to her past. In this community of immortals, Nastasya learns about good and bad magic, comes to grips with what happened to her family hundreds of years ago, and slowly begins to understand the inherited power that she possesses. Kelly Lintz's delivery is spot-on in her portrayal of Nastasya and her witty, sarcastic, laugh-out-loud personality, as well as in relating the events occurring in the story. Listeners will eagerly await the next volume of this intriguing, multi-layered story.—Mary Oluonye, Shaker Heights Public Library, OH