So Immortal Beloved is about Nastasya (she tells her friends to call her 'Nasty' for short) who is an immortal. Immortal simply means they live a long time. They eventually start to age and can die, but for the most part they live like normal humans. They live with humans, appear human, and besides the very slowly aging thing, they are human. A couple immortal perks I noted were they seemingly can recover from any disease they contract and if they lose a limb/toe/tongue it'll eventually grow back.
Anyways, so Nastasya is about 450 years old (hey, when they say live a long time, they mean a LONG TIME, we meet River in the book who is roughly 1300 years old) and she's having party after party after party with her other immortal friends. They leave a club one night and get a cab to take them to the next club but the cabbie driver is rude as all get out. So Incy (that's his nickname, his real name is Innocencio, ridiculous) gets all pissy and uses magic on the cabbie driver to make his spine break. We later find out from a news report that the dude is paralyzed from the shoulders down. Horrible.
Nastasya is extremely shocked by Incy's actions and kept telling him to fix him but Incy pushes through to the next club. Incy basically seems to have taken some sort of extreme delight in his actions which shakes Nastasya even more since in the about 100 years that she's known him, he's never been downright malicious. In an effort to forget about it, Nastasya drinks herself into a dark place and wakes up at some dude's place. This is has become her routine for when things are ugly, get bad, etc She drinks until she's practically dead, but since she's immortal she just gets a really bad hangover but doesn't die from it. Upon waking up she can't shake the horror she feels towards Incy or the horror she feels towards herself for not having done anything. So she takes up an immortal, River, on an offer to escape from all the partying (they met briefly in 1915 or something) and to figure out what really matters.
Nastasya leaves all her friends behind without telling them where she's going and disappears off the map. She doesn't take much with her and doesn't connect to any other immortals on her way over. Then she enters immortal rehab if you will. The program is designed to get immortals concentrated on their lives, what they want, what matters to them, etc by getting them to do every single task that people now take for granted. Like cooking, making dinner, chores to keep the facility running, etc. It's quite cool.
Nastasya really struggles with it since she hadn't done anything hard in ages. Blah. I think one of the most interesting and favorite parts about the book is Nastasya's running commentary and watch her grow from being this horrible partier doesn't care about a thing to a person who can actually care for other people and watch out for them. It's pretty amazing. Nastasya is funny, quirky, and obnoxious.
The story innately seems to focus on the 'magic' that every immortal has and what they can do with it. I'm looking forward to snatching up the sequel Darkness Falls to see where the author takes it. I think it could be very interesting, or very boring, doom gloom end of the world. But so far, I've liked it a lot and have high hopes for the sequel. I also think it's part of a trilogy, so that should be neat.
But alas, Darkness Falls will not be my next review as I don't have it yet. When I have it, you'll know. For now, happy reading!
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