Book Review: Immortal Beloved by Cate Tiernan.

Product details:
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton.
Hardcover, 400 pages.
Release date: January 6th 2010.
Rating: 3½ out of 5.
Ages: Young Adult.
Source: Received from publisher for review.

New name, new town, new life. Nastasya has done it too often to count. And there's no end in sight. Nothing ever really ends ...when you're immortal. But now, after centuries of feeding from the lives of the innocents around her, of living with little care for others, Nastasya is ready to turn towards the light. '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.' Captivating, intense and with an incredible and original voice, EVERLASTING LIFE is a haunting story of friendship, love and secrets, tragedy and loss. Sometimes life is eternal...

Immortal Beloved, the first instalment in a new paranormal trilogy from Cate Tiernan, introduces us to Nastasya, or Nasty, as she is known to friends, a girl with everlasting life, who has partied her way through the last four and a half centuries living an alcohol and drug-fuelled lifestyle full of debauchery and mayhem. The book opens with a disturbing scene which leads Nastasya to question, at first, the motives of her friends, and then her whole way of live. She decides to check out of her old life, and find a new beginning at a safe-house for wayward immortals, but she soon finds that her past is not all that easy to escape…

Immortal Beloved is essentially the story of Nastasya, and the book is very much a first in a series book with a heavy focus on characterisation, background and world building. For me, the storyline was a little slow in places, and much of the readers enjoyment of the book will hinge on how they react to Nastasya. I’m not sure that I am Nastasya’s biggest fan, but I will say that I warmed to her as the book progressed, and she is certainly an intriguing subject.

Nastasya’s story is told through the use of flashbacks, encompassing her whole life and many different identities, and we soon learn that she has many dark secrets in her past. This troubled past has led Nastasya to shut herself off emotionally, but with the help of River, an even older immortal than Nastasya, she begins to re-assess her life and learn to live with her past little by little. Nastasya slowly settles into life at the safe-house, but her friends from her old life are in constant pursuit of her and desperate to track her down. There is also a romantic interest in the book in the form of Reyn, an immortal who Nastasya is instantly attracted to despite the fact that he can’t stand being around her. He is strangely familiar to her, though, and she can’t figure out why.

There are a lot of storylines here that are developed but then never fully realised, and while I’m sure they will be explored further as the series progresses, I needed a little more action here to keep me completely engrossed in this one. As it was, I found the pacing too slow for my tastes, although Tiernan’s world building is rich and evocative, and the complex character of Nastasya is well drawn. As a character study, the book is a gem, although I am hoping for more action, more secrets uncovered, and maybe even a little more romance in the next book, Darkness Falls, out later this year.