Chloe Gong’s adult fantasy debut, Immortal Longings, is inspired by Shakespeare just as much as her YA novels are. But in this case, it’s the real-life tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra which shapes this science-fiction twist on the Bard. Unfortunately, Gong imports a little too much of The Hunger Games into her brew, causing the entire affair to come off as somewhat derivative compared to her usually flavorful stew.

Yearly, the kingdom of Talin hosts a violent athletic contest-slash-game between its capitol cities. There’s Er, the land of the rich, and San, the land of the poor. San-Er citizens come from miles around and use their magical abilities to slaughter their enemies in exchange for attention, money and glory. Since qi – a genetic mutation – allows them to take over the bodies of their opponents, that makes the game quite a tricky one to follow.

Our two central characters are Princess Calla Tuoleimi and Anton Makusa. Calla was once a member of the ruling class of Er, but the majority of her family was killed in a massacre – which she orchestrated, hoping to end the land-and-cash fat monarchy for good. She faked her own death on the way out, but planed a return. She’s going to win the games and meet her Uncle Kasa face to face, at which point she hopes to slaughter him, too.

Anton’s goals are much more personal and much more desperate. He’s a former aristocrat who enters the game hoping to get money enough to keep his fiancée Otta – who is in a deep coma – alive. Fortunately, he has an extremely strong grasp of qi and is the best jumper in the world.

In this every-person-for-themselves setting, Anton and Calla do not expect to become allies, but they do. They also become involved with the adopted son of Kasa, August, whom Calla plans to put on the throne in the hope of improving things. Is there a way out of this mess for any of them?

Immortal Longings was a bit of a disappointment for me. I don’t know if Chloe Gong’s intense worldbuilding – which she delivers in long info-dumps from characters thinking to themselves – or the lackluster action scenes, or the even more lackluster romance, but something felt off. Most of her grey-moraled characters feel unique and intriguing, but here Anton is cheating on his comatose girlfriend with this murderous (OR IS SHE!?) princess he’s become obsessed with – and that’s really his only personality trait. Everyone spends so much time hopping bodies that the book doesn’t take time to let the characters in question figure out who they really are, which, to Gong’s credit, is something that the characters do address out loud.

The readable prose will keep you going; Gong can paint a picture like no one else. And I liked the evil August in his wickedness. But I loved Juliette and Romeo from her These Violent Delights series (and Marshall and the rest), and here the romance is fraught in a not-fun way. The book also doesn’t bother to ask any queasy consent questions about all of this body jumping. Our main characters do not bother to think of that and use the bodies they ‘inherit’ to their full advantage.

Gong was inspired by Kowloon Walled City (which grabs a mention), and that ought to be an excellent locale for the stories she’s created over the past few years. But things get bogged down and even, to my shock, predictable, and when it’s not being predictable it’s confusing. Maybe it’s the attempt at infusing Egyptian and Roman history into a setting that’s both futuristic, fantastic and based on the old Hong Kong. The worldbuilding is wildly ambitious here, but it absolutely gets away from the author, which leaves the reader struggling to remember the hows and whys of what is going on. And yet it’s interesting and the royal caste situation generally works well.

While I’m not sold on the romance here and this is definitely Gong’s least-inspired book, I still want to know how that last plot twist pays off in the second book. Immortal Longings isn’t Chloe Gong’s best novel, but it still compels.