Immortally Beloved

By JadedElegance

Review by Rather_Be_A_Unicorn

Cover/Title

The cover shows us a dark-haired woman with downcast eyes, who I think captures the character of Eleni quite well. The fact she's not facing the camera gives her an air of mystery. I find the title 'Immortally Beloved' is quite fitting for a story about an immortal vampire.

Blurb

While your blurb gives me a good idea of who and what your protagonist is, it's also a bit vague. I would recommend adding something referring to what's at stake (no pun intended :-)). To me, a 250-year-old powerful immortal who is running away to avoid scandal seems not enough of a hook to capture readers if there isn't at least a glimmer included of what will and can happen if the scandal finally catches up with her.

What I liked was the inclusion of the setting, Aubrey Parish, in the blurb. To me, this worked really well, since it makes the setting in this story a character in its own right: "With a constant population of 8,999 souls and rumoured to be a haunted town able to disappear...". This is mysterious and ominous, and it definitely piqued my interest.

Hook

Once opulent and full of the richness of life, the city is nothing but torch-lit darkness, stinking of death and screaming of everything sanguine.

As a hook, I think this is great. It sets the tone of the story well; the relative lightness of Eleni's life as part of the French aristocracy before the Terror, contrasting with the darkness of her life afterwards. This story explores themes of light and darkness, but it does so in a manner that the two very different flip sides of one coin blend together, rather than convey it in a black-and-white manner. One cannot appreciate one without knowing the other and this first sentence captures that image beautifully.

Grammar/Style

Overall, your sentences flowed well and the author's rich descriptions painted a vivid picture. Some sentences were indeed on the long side, but it was easy enough to follow along. To me personally, it wasn't problematic and I never felt like I got lost.

There are some tense shifts from present to past tense, but the author mentioned in the introduction that this will be fixed in editing.

Narrative

Apart from Eleni's diary entries, the story is written in 3rd limited multiple point of view, present tense. I'm usually not a fan of having multiple POV-switches in a scene because it's incredibly difficult to pull off well without reverting to blatant head-hopping, but I have to say that I often felt myself so immersed in the story that the point of view switches in scenes hardly ever bothered me.

One thing to look out for is that in order to stick to 3rd limited to not refer to Eleni in paragraphs from Eleni's POV as (for instance) 'the raven-haired girl'. Though I realize this isn't written in deep point of view, to me it felt unnatural for a character to refer to herself as 'the raven-haired girl' when we are in her POV. To me, it signals a POV-shift from Eleni to another character to me, especially at the beginning of paragraph, but that wasn't always the case.

For instance in this scene between Eleni and Victor:

"The raven-haired woman tosses him a charming smile while he speaks. She can almost hear his thoughts when she tries, though not precisely. His mind is loud and uninhibited, making him more than a little vulnerable to the likes of her."

The first sentence of the paragraph would be fine if it was written from Victor's perspective, but as is evident by the rest of the paragraph, we're actually in Eleni's point of view. In paragraphs like this one, just writing 'Eleni' instead of 'the raven-haired girl' feels more natural since it's a more seamless transition between viewpoint-characters in a scene.

Protagonist

Eleni is the protagonist of the story, a complex and layered character who survived the Terror in France during the late 18th century, but at a great personal cost. Ten chapters into the story we don't yet know how Eleni came to be a vampire, but what we do know, is that throughout her mortal life, she suffered greatly: at the hands of her rapists, at the hands of her brother, and at the hands of her Italian husband. However, Eleni never comes across as a victim. Even when she narrates these events in her diary entries, she still creates distance, sometimes almost as if she's narrating the events as if they happened to someone else, but not to herself. To me, that felt like a very realistic coping mechanism.

She ends up in Aubrey Parish after half the town of New Orleans accused her of the death of her husband Hugo. She's a vampire, but she seems to resent certain parts of her vampiric nature. She likes her powers; she can compel people to wish to please her, hear people's thoughts and enhance their feelings with her touch. Another one of her gifts is that when she's in a certain trance she writes letters to herself from the future. It's a power of foresight she doesn't really understand herself, and apart from a diary entry in the second chapter, this power isn't discussed much in the first ten chapters.

I think Eleni's character is best described by her letter from the future in the second chapter:

Mentioning Odelie to him should do no good. She shall want no remembrance of me, save perhaps trying to seduce the man I died loving. He might even seek her out, choose to love her without realising all how she is just like me. I wish I could think more highly, but I know my daughter. In so many ways, she is the most like me of all of them. It would be a triumph to win over her dead mother's beloved. So, I shall never speak to him about Odelie.

In this entry, Eleni admits that out of all her children Odelie is most like her, but that she also doesn't think highly of her daughter and thus, by extension herself. In this chapter, she also wonders if she'll become someone strong, which to me indicated that in spite of everything she has endured in life, she still doesn't fully recognize her own strength yet.

Plot/Pacing

While I enjoyed the first four chapters, I couldn't help but feeling that chapter 2-4 (with the exception of the diary entries) took me on a detour before I'd even hit the main road. While the scenery of the detour was enjoyable enough--your descriptions leapt off the page, particularly when it came to the hotel and Aubrey Parish--I did miss a sense of direction of where this story was heading, apart from Eleni's letter from the future in chapter two.

This letter felt like an important plot point, but there was rarely any mention of it again in the first ten chapters. Like, for instance, who is Edward? He'll become important to Eleni later on in her life, that much is clear, but is it someone she already knows? Has she been to that town in Oregon before, and what's the deal with her children, who are also vampires and who she appears to be estranged from? Though I know these questions will most likely be addressed later on in the story, the fact that the plot point was dropped almost immediately after it was made, felt a bit of abrupt. Personally, I would have liked to learn more about that--maybe not in a way this plot point would take center stage, but perhaps more in the way of the echoing of a cymbal crash.

However, the pace of the story picks up significantly when Eleni meets Victor in chapter 5. Victor is a Russian mafia boss and by no means a good man (he slips Eleni an opium-laced sweet, for instance) but he owns both his good side and his bad side. He's an interesting character and the fact that he makes no apologies for who he is forms a sharp contrast to Eleni, because despite her confidence, I couldn't escape the feeling that she both loves and loathes her vampiric nature. She loves the immortality, the power and the strength it gives to her, but she appears to be in denial about the part where she has to suck people dry of their blood. I think this inner conflict was played out really well in her interaction with Victor, and the addition of the voice of an unknown third party inside Eleni's head that coerces Eleni into compelling Victor to make her his sole benefactor before she kills him, really added to that inner conflict. I felt that this was where we really started to scratch beneath Eleni's carefully composed surface and what I saw really captured my desire to read on.

Finally, in chapter nine and ten we are introduced to a couple of new characters, who I thought were drawn out very well, especially Colton and Mr. Grimm (I love this nod to the Grimm brothers btw). These characters really added to the eclectic and perhaps not entirely human mix of Aubrey Parish's residents and I can't wait to read more about the part they will come to play in Eleni's story.

Closing comment

'Immortally Beloved' is unlike other paranormal stories, both on and off Wattpad. It's layered complexity doesn't make for a lighthearted read, but for the reader who's willing to immerse himself in Eleni's carefully crafted world, there's a lot of beauty and joy to be found. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a paranormal story that goes above and beyond the boundaries of the genre and I look forward to reading more!