Book Review: Immortal by Gillian Shields

Release Date: August 4, 2009
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Age Group: Young Adult
Pages: 368
Summary:
Wyldcliffe Abbey School for Young Ladies, housed in a Gothic mansion on the bleak northern moors, is elite, expensive, and unwelcoming. When Evie Johnson is torn away from her home by the sea to become the newest scholarship student, she is more isolated than she could have dreamed. Strict teachers, snobbish students, and the oppressive atmosphere of Wyldcliffe leave Evie drowning in loneliness.

Evie's only lifeline is Sebastian, a rebellious, mocking, dangerously attractive young man she meets by chance. As Evie's feelings for Sebastian grow with each secret meeting, she starts to fear that he is hiding something about his past. And she is haunted by glimpses of a strange, ghostly girl—a girl who is so eerily like Evie, she could be a sister. Evie is slowly drawn into a tangled web of past and present that she cannot control. And as the extraordinary, elemental forces of Wyldcliffe rise up like the mighty sea, Evie is faced with an astounding truth about Sebastian, and her own incredible fate.

Gillian Shields's electrifying tale will dazzle readers with suspense, mysticism, and romance. (From HarperCollins.com)
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Evie Johnson, the main character and first person narrator of Gillian Shields's Immortal, arrives at the train station near Wyldcliffe Abbey School for Young Girls on a cold and rainy night and loads her things into a taxi. She tells the taxi driver, "Wyldcliffe, please," and settles in for the ride. When the taxi reaches Wyldcliffe and Evie tells the driver her destination is the school, however, he refuses to take her to "that cursed place". Evie gets out of the cab and ends up wet and unhappy--but the reader ends up hooked.

Immortal is a fun read, in large part because--as with the taxi driver refusing to take Evie to "that cursed place"-- Shields really goes to town with the gothic cliches. Wyldcliffe Abbey is a rambling old building, complete with a lake, ruins, and a grotto on the grounds. The "high mistress" of the school is severe and intimidating. There's also an old necklace, plenty of rain, a beautiful boy, a ghost of sorts, and some dabbling in the occult. To top it off, Evie is a scholarship student, and as such is made to do chores around the school. At this point even Evie notices how much her life is beginning to resemble a novel or a fairytale and says to the other scholarship student:

"Don't you think all this doing-chores stuff is a bit over the top? . . . . You know, like Cinderella, only with about two hundred ugly stepsisters. What else do they expect us to do? Sleep in the cellar?"

While Evie doesn't sleep in the cellar, she does sneak out of Wyldcliffe at night to be with the mysterious Sebastian, who tends to steal the show whenever he shows up, even when he's being annoying. (Which he does a lot.) No matter how entertaining I found him, though, I found his and Evie's fast blooming love a bit hollow.

Steering away from the boy, Immortal weaves two story lines into one plot, one tale belonging to Evie and the other to the journal of Lady Agnes, a teenage girl who lived in the Abbey in the 1880s when it was still a home, not a school. Of the two, I prefered Lady Agnes's narrative; Evie is more of a drama queen, and her narration is frequently redundant.

In putting the two stories together, Shields establishes a definite pattern that, while establishing unity between the two plotlines, also becomes repetitive in an amusing way. The last line of each journal entry by Lady Agnes is echoed in the first line of Evie's next chapter.

Example 1:

[Lady Agnes] There can be no harm, surely, in something so beautiful?

Turn page.

[Evie] Sebastian was beautiful, just as I had remembered.

Example 2:

[Lady Agnes] I have never felt so alive.

Turn page.

[Evie] I had never felt so depressed.

And so on and so forth.

All things considered, Gillian Shields's Immortal is deliciously creepy, gothic, romantic, and mildly addicting--a good, fun read. When I began reading, I thought Immortal was a standalone title, but it's clear from the ending that there is at least one more installment to come--in 2010 according to Shields's page at HarperCollins--and this looks like a series worth getting into.

Book source: My local library.