Spoiler-Free Review

If you read the short story, The Six Deaths of the Saint, this is the novelization of that concept. The Everlasting is its own story though, and it does differ from Six Deaths by quite a margin. It might be one of my favorite reads this year.

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What’s The Everlasting about?

Owen Mallory is a failed soldier of Dominion, a self-professed cowardly scholar, when the chancellor sends him ten centuries back in time to the era of Una Everlasting, Dominion’s greatest heroine of old, to document her story. Except, this may not be the first time it’s happened.

Myth-making time loops and a love story. What more can a girl want?

“I have loved you since before I was born, I think. I have studied you, worshipped you, lost you, mourned you.”

This is a story with the dimensions of an epic, but told in 300 pages. Harrow doesn’t waste a sentence; it felt like each word was chosen with care, the prose crafted with art. In fact, the prose was so incredible, I had to read this story slowly over the course of a week, absorbing it and luxuriating in it.

The heart of The Everlasting is a love story. It’s about two people displaced in time, each being used to further the ends of another. They felt real. Their humanness lifted off the pages and you root for them, even as they fail over and over, even as you know they are doomed to repeat these moments, always reaching for each other and never getting to keep each other.

It was also a dissection of myth-making. I thought it said some interesting things about the way we, as nations, rely heavily on foundation myths, and how these myths shape our views today of who we are. The characters of The Everlasting prune back the truth to shape it how they like, clipping off the less “acceptable” realities in favor of a story others would approve of or take inspiration from.

And the ending. The journey and heartbreak of the story was worth it to reach that ending.

Should you read The Everlasting?

I recommend this to anyone looking for a story that feels almost like a fairytale, and if you like love stories, time loops, magic, poetic prose, second person narration, characters who fail at their prescribed roles in society, and lady knights.

If you want super hard, explained worldbuilding and magic system rules – this won’t be for you. It has magic, but it’s not about magic, it’s about the characters.