Part 1: Sauron’s Princess Saves A Cat
Part 2: Immortal Incest Sauron
Part 3: Dinner With Sauron
Part 4: Escape From Megacity One
Part 5: I Guess We Care About Gregor Now
Part 6: Chase After Chase
Part 7: Desert Snakes
Part 8: History Lesson
Part 9: Love Letter 2: Love Harder
Part 10: Cyborg Rebel Commander
Part 11: Immortality Cured
The Immortality Cure is meant to be the first book in a trilogy of duologies, six books total, each duology taking place in a different era of the same world, with only one common character between them, a secret eternal alchemist. So, CJ Olsen really wants to be Brandon Sandersen (who, if you are not aware, supposedly has a single common character present in all of his books, who is some kind of planeswalker that goes under several different aliases).
And you should not read this planned sprawling epic, because its first book is bad and I see little reason to believe the second book will not also be bad. The book has a prefixation with its female lead’s breasts that I put a moratorium on commenting on early on because of how incessant it was, and while that prefixation waxed and waned, it never went away and several of its most egregious examples show up towards the end of the book, so it’s not a habit the book eventually grows out of, either. The main characters experience no meaningful change except the realization that they want to boink each other, which, devoid of any need to overcome character flaws in order to make that relationship work, isn’t at all compelling. There are some motions in the general direction of a character arc, like female lead Charlotte going from scared of heights at the beginning to flying an airship at the end, but despite the narrative’s insistence, Charlotte shows no sign of becoming generally more assertive and self-confident. Getting over her fear of heights isn’t symbolic of character growth, it’s substituted for character growth.
The book has some interesting ideas. Its alchemy system isn’t extremely deep, but there are some cool monsters and its one major rule is actually used in the story in a way that could have been interesting had CJ Olsen not forgotten that main villain Harthum disclosed the most important consequence of that system in his very first onpage appearance clear back in act one, thus rendering the entire investigation into alchemy moot, since our protagonist knew the critical information from the start and the rest was window dressing. Airships are fun, so it’s a shame that we leave ours behind almost as soon as the adventure begins.
But the fact that I can’t even mention the good parts without also mentioning how they don’t really get a chance to shine makes it pretty clear that this book isn’t a mixed bag. There are bits of it that could have been part of another, better book, but the book they’re in is pretty dull, and doesn’t know what to do with these interesting elements, which means they don’t get a chance to improve the narrative much at all.
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