Review of Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang

*Immaculate Conception* by Ling Ling Huang (2025). Published by Dutton.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

While I am eternally grateful to be in the financial position where I could work on the blog instead of stocking shelves in a grocery store, I kind of realized this was an opportunity I was probably never going to get in my life again. I was really catching up on all the movies and books I’d been meaning to read for the longest time but never had the time to get to.

I’ve also been tackling my advance copy collection, which means those reviews are going to trickle out into the world slowly but surely. I try to get them out on the day of their release, but sometimes I don’t get to do that if life gets in the way or I’m particularly busy and didn’t read it on time. I do end up reading them eventually and get that review out though!

Today’s blog post is going to be on a book I’d been meaning to read, and finally got around to. I requested it through my local library, which was pretty exciting once the book was actually in my hands. I love my local library to death because of how it has so many books I want to read—they’re really good at getting all of the new releases and whatnot.

Let’s get into the review! This was a fairly short read for me, as the pages just seemed to fly by while I was reading it. Think I finished this one in about an hour and a half.

A story of two friends from art school, and what both envy and technology can do to us.

We see this story from the perspective of a character named Enka, who, at the beginning of the story, is looking to go to art school. As we see throughout the course of the book, her work is good, but it’s not spectacular. She lacks the distinct imagination or direct star power of someone who’s going to make it in the art world, nor does she have the parents with connections to get her foot in the door.

Enka is admitted to the art school on a scholarship when she is the only one to apply for a technology art scholarship, and there she begins crafting her next work. It’s another female student though who catches everyone’s eye, including Enka’s, and might be the darling of the art world: Mathilde.

The two girls end up bonding when Mathilde is emotionally vulnerable, although, as we see throughout the course of the novel, Enka’s interest in their friendship goes beyond caring about the other girl. Her obsession with Mathilde goes beyond something we can deem as friendship, and crosses several boundaries.

As Enka struggles to produce work that’s provocative, Mathilde creates a sculpture about her father’s dying moments in 9/11, creating a frenzy among the students and the media because of how impactful and powerful her work is. Quickly she rises through the ranks of the art world, being invited to present her work at the Venice Biennale, leaving behind her classmates in the dust.

We see Enka enviously watching over Mathilde’s success as she struggles to produce work that has a remarkable story and wins people over in the same way that Mathilde is going. At the same time, classmates are rapidly dropping out of the school because of technology and how it seeks to inform—or deny—whether a piece of art is a direct inspiration and/or plagiarism.

A big break for Enka comes when she contacts the people and company behind her scholarship. Now thrust into the world of some of the world’s richest people, her trajectory is about to change too. She marries the billionaire behind the company who sponsored her and becomes wrapped around the wealthy elite’s fingers and the technology produces.

And when she gets the chance to occupy Mathilde’s mind, satisfying her obsession on where her creativity comes from, Enka jumps at the opportunity, completely changing both of their lives and the art world together. Not only is a way to create a consistent output, but it’s also the source of incredible controversy—as we see in the novel.

Overall Thoughts

I found the concept of this novel to be quite interesting, especially as I’m interested in creative industries and how the people working within them can feed off of each other. You can read that statement as positive or negative, and this book is an example of how the negativity of feeding off of someone’s envy and creativity isn’t going to be a net positive for the world as a whole.

What Enka does in the novel I can understand, but I don’t really care for her as a character. Her decision to occupy Mathilde’s mind isn’t one I would respect in the real world, especially when they start producing art and Enka begins occupying her friend’s mind more and more.

In terms of the book’s structure though: I thought that this felt a little rushed. We could’ve used some more world building; in the beginning of the book we really got that in the art school, but then we fly through the years and various experiences at a rapid speed. This didn’t work for me personally as a reader, and I began to feel my interest waning as I kept reading through the story.

I do think people out there will really like this one. I find it interesting and compelling, but the execution falls short and doesn’t satisfy me personally.

Go pick this one up if it interests you and you want to read it! You might like it a lot more than I did, as taste is so incredibly objective.

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