I Love You Don't Die A Novel

"Song writes beautifully of a young woman's aching heart as she faces the challenges of big city life. This one strikes just the right balance between melancholy and hope." - Publishers Weekly

"A necessary and moving work about how death can be our greatest teacher for how to live, I Love You Don't Die is an ode to the power of friendship and community's ability to be the bridge we build on our way to death. How can a society that doesn't value life possibly prepare for death? Song reckons with these and other urgent questions, exploring the commodification of death and how consumerism is another kind of death that also seeks to reduce our humanity into objects or output. This book made me seek out my loved ones and hold them a little closer." - Ling Ling Huang, award winning author of Natural Beauty and Immaculate Conception

"Beautiful, rich, and captivating. Jade Song invites you into an immersive season of melancholy, where hearts run free and love ambushes as readily as death itself. An experience to be savored."

- Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth

"Achingly, urgently, Jade Song probes at loneliness with some of the most poetic prose I've ever had the good luck to read. A dizzying and yearning story of love and loss, I can't remember the last time a book made me gasp like this one did. Death, sex, student debt-I Love You Don't Die is unflinching."

I Love You Don't Die is a heartfelt meditation on life, death, and the loved ones who give those words meaning. This novel fervently begs the questions: What do you want from your life? What will it take to get it? And what happens when you and those closest to you have diverging answers? With wry wit, Jade Song satirizes corporate culture and the commodification of everything, even death. They so wonderfully capture the capitalist malaise-and the rare, wonderful moments in life that burst through it. From a great first date in Green-Wood Cemetery to the funerary shops in Chinatown, this is a New York that feels lived in. The beating heart of this story is the enduring friendship at its center. More than anything else, I Love You Don't Die will make you want to call your best friend. - Katie Yee, author of Maggie

This book messed me up; and it is messy. The relationships are grotesquely intimate, deep friendships full of selfishness and radiant grief that often knocked the wind out of me. It's so good. And I hated it.

- Natalie Zina Walschots, author of Hench

"I Love You Don't Die is a gorgeously penned meditation on death, life and love. With tenderness and sharp clarity, it illuminates who and what we truly value and asks what it is we are really living for. Song reminds us that amid the chaos of late-stage capitalism, we all leave behind far more than we allow ourselves to worry about. I relished every page." - Warona Jay, author of The Grand Scheme of Things

"This book made me laugh, cry, and laugh again. It's a story about love in all of its forms, a lyrical and witty meditation on what it means to be and to feel alive. Rarely have I seen the nuances of mental illness depicted so accurately; I Love You Don't Die is a book that will stay with me for a while." - Jake Hall, author of The Art of Drag

"This novel starkly depicts the effects of untreated mental illness, social isolation, and the social and economic pressures of today's U.S. The hope that gleams through the pages is well earned. A primal scream-meets-love letter to a generation struggling to survive late-stage capitalism." - Kirkus

"Song's debut is a strikingly original coming-of-age story...Full of contradictions, magnificently balancing and remarkably sustaining wonder with dread and magical realism with harsh reality, with a heartbreakingly beautiful and intensely uneasy tone, this is a story that will hold readers in its thrall. Ripe for discussion, Chlorine is a great choice for fans of weird, immersive, female-driven body horror by authors like Julia Armfield, Cassandra Khaw, and Carmen Maria Machado." - Booklist (starred review)

"Song's harrowing novel subverts the standards of merfolk lore - clamshell bras, underwater kingdoms, the love of a sailor or prince."

"Ms. Song is good on the growing pains of young adulthood...[This is] a book that enlivens its coming-of-age yarn with a touch of mystery and a twist of myth." - The Economist

"Like the scent of chlorine on one's skin, this not-to-be-missed debut novel lingers." - Library Journal (starred review)

"This book was viscerally unnerving and I could not put it down." - Sarah Gailey, author of The Echo Wife

"Ren Yu is a fierce young woman who's dreamed of mermaids ever since she can remember-dreams so vivid that the first touch of water in a swimming pool alters her life forever, sending her down a path that's both beautiful and frightening. Chlorine isn't just a coming of age story. It's the tale of transformation from human to something wilder and more transcendent. It's about love and longing and the willingness to do anything to become who you truly are." - Richard Kadrey, New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim series

"This fantastically strange, explosive debut novel entrances even as it unsettles. It's so brilliantly written." - Buzzfeed

"In Song's disturbing and visionary debut, a child pushed too hard to succeed becomes a monster of her own making... The body horror is striking, as is Song's prose, in which she riffs on the various ways the team members are "mutilated" ("We mutilated our beauty, though this sense of beauty was an outdated version defined by narrow wrists and bird bones"). It's a singular coming-of-age." - Publishers Weekly

"A notable debut that marks a distinctive career to watch." - Kirkus Reviews

"A visceral and startling debut novel by Jade Song, Chlorine is a portrait of ambition, defiance and longing set in the world of competitive swimming... Song invites readers to enter into Ren's obsessions not with judgment or disgust, but with an understanding that is surprisingly tender in the face of the novel's abrasion." - Shelf Awareness

"With their debut novel, Song presents a beautiful and horrific coming-of-age story about the power of transcendence to become who you truly are." - This is Horror

"Chlorine is not for the faint of heart. Fierce and visceral, it seethes with rage and pain and the urgency of transformation. There are no pretty mermaids wearing seashell bras here, but readers open to sinking into darker waters will be captivated." - Ann Claycomb, author of the forthcoming Silenced

"...Chlorine is an exceptionally strong debut. It's shocking and tender, fantastical and intimate, gorgeous and grotesque. After reading "Chlorine," readers will not only forget everything they know about mermaids - they may never look at a mermaid the same way again." - The Harvard Crimson

"...a tender story of a lonely outcast girl who just wanted to transcend into a body which reveled in power not pain." - The Fantasy Hive

"[A] powerful debut novel" - Locus Magazine

"Transformation, whether supernatural or not, is often riddled with loss and difficulty, and Jade Song boldly refuses to let us forget that." - Xtra Magazine

"Chlorine not just a single work but a dialogue between many different works." - The Boston Globe