- The Good: Epic time-travel fantasy about how stories from the past can shape our future
- The Bad: Slow-burn
- The Literary: Arthurian-esqe legends
Owen Mallory grew up on the legend, songs, and stories of Sir Una Everlasting, Dominion’s greatest hero, a knight who died for queen and country centuries ago. Owen even dreams of her, through his days as a soldier, and now as a struggling scholar. When he receives an offer to write her biography, their lives become tangled together, and he travels to the past to retell the same story over and over again.
The Everlasting doesn’t quite fall into the romantasy category, but it’s close, and I think it straddles the line of time-travel fantasy romance quite well. In essence, a big dangerous lady-knight and an anxious historian fall in love, realize they’re being forced to re-live their lives over and over again, and try to break the spell. The story is structured such that we readers observe a handful of these iterations.
I really enjoy the lyrical prose of this one, which takes a little inspiration from Arthurian legend, including a sword embedded in a yew tree and a quest for a grail. The story feels unique, though I’ve read my share of time-travel fantasties. There is a reason for all the iterative time traveling, which has to do with an evil queen who tweaks the past to rewrite history to give her maximum power and propaganda in the future. The plot is a little convoluted, but all is eventually revealed in a satisfying conclusion. There’s also a little magic, and dragons that are mostly off-screen.
Harrow emphasizes the gender role swapping here, with a masculine female and a feminine man, which is interesting. But it’s too much of a focus, and the constant reminders of this inversion tend towards caricature. I realize it’s necessary to establish a baseline and communicate that Owen and Una are living the same story over and over again, but it’s nearly a half of the book, so the real investment in these characters doesn’t happen until after that. The antagonist is an evil queen who’s a little too over-the-top, though at least her backstory and motivation is revealed.
Recommended as an audiobook because the multiple narrators help distinguish POV for the chapters written in second person perspective.