Alix E. Harrow has built her literary reputation on dismantling fairy tales and rebuilding them with sharper edges. After the gothic mystery of Starling House and the feminist reimaginings of her Fractured Fables novellas, she returns with The Everlasting, a narrative that asks a devastating question: What happens when you discover your entire life is a story someone else has been telling for a thousand years?
The answer, it turns out, involves blood, time travel, and the kind of love that refuses to stay buried.
The Story Within the Story
At its core, The Everlasting presents a dual narrative that collapses in on itself like a temporal paradox. We follow Una, the legendary knight whose death created an empire, and Owen Mallory, a failed soldier turned struggling scholar who becomes obsessed with her tale. When Owen receives a mysterious medieval manuscript, he’s pulled into the past to play his appointed role: the cowardly historian who must document Una’s heroic death, over and over across countless timelines.
The brilliance of Harrow’s construction lies in how she uses the structure of legend itself as her framework. The book is divided into Una’s multiple deaths, each one a variation on the same tragic theme. Yet with each iteration, small details shift. Memories surface like artifacts from archaeological digs. The perfect tragedy begins to crack at the seams, revealing something far more sinister underneath.
Harrow’s prose alternates between Una’s fierce, present-tense immediacy and Owen’s more reflective voice. This isn’t merely stylistic flourish; it mirrors their relationship to time itself. Una lives perpetually in the now of battle and survival, while Owen exists as memory made flesh, a man haunted by versions of events that haven’t happened yet.
The Machinery of Myth
Where The Everlasting transcends typical time-travel romance is in its interrogation of how stories serve power. The villain isn’t a dragon or an invading army, but Vivian Rolfe, a woman who discovered how to weaponize narrative itself. She doesn’t merely travel through time; she edits history like a manuscript, sending her characters back through iterations until they perform their roles perfectly.
The revelation of Vivian’s manipulation transforms everything that came before. What seemed like fate was choreography. What felt like destiny was merely repetition. Una’s legendary prowess isn’t natural talent but muscle memory accumulated across lifetimes of forced practice. Her tragic death isn’t noble sacrifice but calculated propaganda, designed to inspire generations of soldiers to die for an empire that was never meant to serve them.
Harrow writes these revelations with a surgeon’s precision, letting readers feel the slow horror of understanding alongside her characters. The body remembers, Vivian tells Owen, and in that simple statement lies the book’s most chilling implication: How much of what we call identity is simply the accumulated scar tissue of trauma we can’t consciously recall?
Love Against the Architecture of Time
The romance between Una and Owen unfolds across centuries and timelines, building through fragmented memories and stolen moments. Harrow handles their relationship with remarkable restraint, understanding that when two people have loved and lost each other countless times, every gesture carries the weight of all those vanished lifetimes.
Their connection feels earned precisely because Harrow refuses to make it easy. Owen must grapple with his complicity in Una’s repeated deaths, even as he falls in love with the woman he’s been tasked to doom. Una, meanwhile, discovers that the person she’s built her entire identity around—Queen Yvanne—has been using her as a tool, reshaping her through cycles of death and resurrection until she became the perfect weapon.
The book’s emotional climax doesn’t come from grand declarations but from smaller acts of rebellion: Owen choosing to warn Una instead of playing his part, Una deciding her life matters more than her legend. When they finally run together through time, building a fragile life in the margins of history, the domesticity feels revolutionary. They have children. They grow old. They choose ordinariness over myth, and Harrow makes that choice feel like the bravest thing either character has ever done.
The Weight of Structure
Yet for all its ambition, The Everlasting occasionally buckles under its own complexity. The middle section, where Owen pieces together the extent of Vivian’s manipulation, slows to an academic pace that may test readers’ patience. Harrow’s background as a historian shows through in these passages, but the archival research sequences, while thematically relevant, sometimes interrupt the narrative momentum.
The book’s structure also creates an inherent challenge: because we know Una must die repeatedly, the stakes of individual timelines can feel diminished. Harrow works hard to vary each iteration, but there’s an unavoidable sense of treading water until the characters remember enough to break the cycle. Some readers may find the repetition purposeful and hypnotic; others might wish for more forward motion in the first half.
The ending, too, may divide audiences. Without spoiling specifics, Harrow opts for ambiguity over neat resolution. She leaves readers with questions about how much the characters truly escaped versus simply finding a different kind of trap. It’s thematically consistent with a book about the impossibility of ever fully knowing one’s own story, but those seeking clear catharsis might feel the conclusion is frustratingly open-ended.
The Literary Legacy
The Everlasting stands in conversation with works that interrogate the relationship between history and storytelling. Readers of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built will recognize similar questions about purpose and meaning. Those who loved Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory will appreciate the examination of how propaganda shapes individual lives. And fans of T. Kingfisher’s Swordheart will find familiar territory in the romance between a warrior woman and the man who sees past her legend.
Harrow’s previous works—particularly The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches—explored similar themes of women reclaiming their narratives from those who would silence them. But The Everlasting feels more mature, willing to sit with discomfort and refuse easy answers. The book acknowledges that escaping one story might simply mean stepping into another, and that freedom is often just a different kind of constraint.
The Craft of Repetition
Despite its occasional structural challenges, Harrow’s prose remains exceptional. She has mastered the art of writing battle scenes that focus not on tactics but on the terrible intimacy of violence. Her medieval setting feels lived-in without drowning readers in period detail. And her ability to shift registers—from Una’s blunt, present-tense narration to Owen’s more ornate historical voice to the fairy-tale cadence of the Everlasting legends—demonstrates remarkable range.
The book’s greatest achievement is making repetition itself become meaningful. Each time Una dies, each iteration of their story, accumulates weight rather than losing it. Harrow understands that trauma doesn’t simply repeat; it compounds. Memory doesn’t just record; it rewrites. By the final pages, when Una and Owen make their ultimate choice, we feel the gravity of every version of themselves they’re choosing to become.
Who Should Read This Book
The Everlasting will particularly resonate with readers who appreciate literary fantasy that prioritizes character psychology over plot mechanics, romance that grapples with questions of agency and consent, and narratives willing to interrogate the very idea of heroism. Those seeking traditional epic fantasy with clear battles between good and evil may find its moral ambiguity frustrating.
The book also rewards careful reading. Harrow plants details early that only gain significance in retrospect, and the full implications of certain revelations emerge slowly. This isn’t a beach read; it’s a text that benefits from attention and patience.
Final Verdict
The Everlasting is an ambitious, occasionally unwieldy meditation on fate, free will, and the stories we tell about ourselves. Harrow has crafted a time-travel romance that uses its genre trappings to explore genuinely difficult questions about identity, manipulation, and whether escape is ever truly possible. While its structure may challenge some readers and its ending won’t satisfy everyone, the book succeeds brilliantly at what matters most: making us care deeply about two people fighting for the right to write their own story.
In an era of endless reboots and recycled narratives, The Everlasting asks whether we’re all just playing predetermined roles. Its answer—that the attempt to break free matters, even if we can never be certain we’ve succeeded—feels both honest and necessary.
Similar Books Worth Exploring
If you enjoyed The Everlasting, consider these titles:
- This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone – Epistolary time-travel romance with lyrical prose
- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab – Another exploration of identity across centuries
- Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh – Questions of propaganda and predetermined purpose
- The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon – Epic fantasy featuring a legendary female knight
- Swordheart by T. Kingfisher – Romance between a warrior and an unlikely companion
- A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark – Historical fantasy that reimagines legend
- Circe by Madeline Miller – Classical myth retold from a woman’s perspective
Other works by Alix E. Harrow:
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January – Portal fantasy about the power of stories
- The Once and Future Witches – Historical fantasy about three sisters and suffrage
- Starling House – Gothic horror with generational trauma
- A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended – Fairy tale retellings from the Fractured Fables series