Book Review: ‘I Love You Don’t Die’ by Jade Song

I really enjoyed Chlorine, Jade Song’s debut, when I read it a few years ago. I was bracing myself for the darkness and sharp commentary in I Love You Don’t Die and this book really delivered on that.

Vicky lives and works in New York City for a young, famous and popular death-positive start-up that creates modern and cute urns and wants to change the attitude that people have around death. Luckily for Vicky, she’s been obsessed with death for as long as she can remember: she thinks about death, talks about death, lives above a Chinatown funeral parlour, and fills her apartment with zhizha. Outside of work and her best friend, she struggles to connect with anyone or drag herself out of bed every day, until a match on a dating app leads her to begin dating a rich couple who she quickly falls in love with. Can Vicky can fight her urge to self-destruct and allow herself to revel in her life.

Thoughts of death really do consume Vicky as a character and so her narration is dark with spiralling ideas about her own death, and the dreams she has of that of her loved ones. Suicidal ideation is present throughout, so I recommend checking the content warnings before going into I Love You Don’t Die, because Jade Song doesn’t hold back on discussions around mental health and depression either.

With all of the dark topics, the novel isn’t hard to read or depressing at all. Song’s writing is lyrical and immersive, and so easy to read; I flew through the novel in only a few sittings. It’s ironically full of life.

There’s a special feeling about novels set in New York City and I Love You Don’t Die sits so happily in that category. Vicky lives in Chinatown and traverses the city throughout the novel, and you can feel the life, the energy, the grime, the pressure of NYC so acutely; the city is a living character. Even with the discussions about how hard life can be in the city financially, it made me long to go back for a visit. There’s something magical about the city, and it’s something that even Vicky embraces too.

Another major conversation in this novel is the power of celebrity and capitalism, even in the business of death. Watching Vicky and Jen comes to terms with how the rigidly structured life they’ve built for themselves around their jobs and their beliefs of the importance of them, the ethics around these companies, and seeing it crumble as they realise that they’re just a part of the machine. It’s a sobering moment for them and for the reader as the novel reaches its crescendo.

Jade Song is a really special writer and with both Chlorine and I Love You Don’t Die under her belt, I cannot wait for whatever she writes next.

Thank you to NetGalley and Footnote Press for the review copy.