In a field in County Longford there is a low green mound that nobody has ploughed in a thousand years. The farmers who leave it alone could not necessarily tell a visitor why. Ireland is full of these things: quiet swellings in otherwise unremarkable pasture, catalogued now among the country’s prehistoric earthworks, and understood for most of recorded history as doors.
Six years before this novel begins, a sixteen-year-old girl went through one of them and did not come back.
Immortal Game by Allison Saft is the story of the sister left standing in the field. Shea Fury was nine when a gold-haired stranger with one silver eye sat down across a chessboard from her, and nineteen when she finally gets a second attempt: Midir of Bri Leith is holding a centennial tournament in the Otherworld, mortals welcome, and the winner may name any boon at all. Shea has spent the intervening decade turning herself into an American grandmaster for exactly this purpose. She is very good. She is also, by any reasonable measure, unwell.
A Life Sharpened Into a Single Point
What makes Immortal Game by Allison Saft more interesting than its logline is that Saft is not really writing a rescue story. She is writing about what happens to a person who narrows her entire adolescence to one objective, achieves the technical mastery required, and discovers that the thing she used to love has been sanded down into a job she performs while feeling nothing. Nobody in Shea’s life has noticed, because from the outside a life like hers looks like discipline.
Shea prepares like a monk and catastrophises like a teenager. Her opening repertoire is a bunker. Her fear of losing has entirely displaced any pleasure in playing, and the book is honest about how unglamorous that is: the flat affect, the sleeplessness, the contempt she has for anyone who competes for fun. Set against her is Ciara of Bri Leith, the king’s much younger sister, a prodigy in a cloak lined with moth wings who is delighted by the game in a way Shea can no longer remember being. The romance works because it is genuinely a duel. These two flirt by analysing each other’s blunders, and neither is willing to lose in order to be liked.
The chess itself is credible, which is rarer than it should be. Time controls carry dramatic weight, the difference between a long classical game and a three-minute scramble is used deliberately, and the famous 1851 game that lends the book its title is invoked with more understanding than decoration. Saft has said she spent years failing to write this novel and only cracked it after learning to play properly. It is visible on the page.
Worth Knowing Before You Start
- Standalone. No connection to her previous fantasies, and a sharper, funnier, more contemporary voice than any of them.
- Content. Parental emotional abuse, achievement-related self-destruction, coercive bargains, body horror around a prosthetic eye, and a minor’s inability to consent to a life-defining deal.
- The chess is not a barrier. Non-players will follow every match. The tension is always psychological rather than positional.
The Myth Underneath
Midir, his stolen bride and his discarded first wife are lifted from one of the oldest stories in Irish literature, in which a king wins a woman at a board game and the wife he set aside spends centuries taking it out on her. Saft keeps the furniture and moves every piece of moral weight. The first wife gets an argument that is difficult to dismiss. The taken girl gets a voice, a chapter, and, crucially, an opinion about her own abduction that nobody in the plot has thought to solicit.
This is where Immortal Game by Allison Saft earns its ending. The final act quietly abandons the question of whether Shea can win and replaces it with a much harder one: what a rescue is actually worth, and whether wanting someone back is the same as wanting what is good for them. The answer costs Shea more than a loss would have, and Saft does not let her off it. Six years of grief turn out to have been aimed at a version of her sister who no longer exists, and possibly never did.
Structurally, this is handled well. Short italic interludes from the sisters’ childhood are threaded between the tournament rounds, and a single late shift in perspective does more emotional work than any confrontation could. The reader arrives at the reversal already holding both halves of it.
There is also Daniil Tsoi, the Russian rival Shea has spent years loathing, whose own sister is held in thrall elsewhere in the Otherworld. He arrives as an obstacle and departs as the best-drawn relationship in the book after Ciara, largely because Saft resists softening him. He is not secretly kind. And he is arrogant, exacting and entirely correct about her weaknesses, and his eventual agonised attempt at a compliment is the funniest passage here.
Where It Loosens
The tournament structure that gives Immortal Game by Allison Saft its momentum also gives it a rut. Prepare, play, recover, brood, repeat: the middle third settles into that loop and stays there past the point of usefulness. Midir’s advantage over his opponents turns out to be less interesting than the mystery of it, and once explained, several matches lose the suspense they were constructed to carry.
The larger problem is the close. Four separate captivities are resolved in roughly thirty pages, a few of them by what amounts to administrative decree, and the prose shifts from dramatising to summarising at precisely the moment it should be doing the opposite. A mother who has done more lasting damage than any faerie in the book is left entirely unaddressed. Readers who came for catharsis will get it; readers who wanted the reckoning will find it deferred.
The romance takes a similar hit in the middle, where a long stretch depends on Ciara withholding something she has no strong reason to withhold. It is a familiar shortcut, and it sits oddly in a relationship otherwise built on both of them saying exactly what they think.
Where to Go Afterwards
- A Treachery of Swans by A.B. Poranek, for a fairy tale rebuilt around the woman it originally blamed.
- The Thorn Queen by Sasha Peyton Smith, for bargains struck across the Veil at ruinous rates.
- What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould, for antagonistic girls and a wilderness that wants something.
- Wings of Starlight and A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft, for readers who want her lusher register.
The Verdict
Immortal Game by Allison Saft is looser and less immaculate than her earlier fantasies, and considerably more alive. The winning move in that 1851 game required giving away nearly everything on the board, and the novel understands the principle: a decade of a young woman’s life, spent, in exchange for a single outcome she never thought to question. The last act arrives too fast and too clean. Everything leading to it is Saft’s best work yet.