Our Infinite Fates weaves an ambitious narrative that spans countless lifetimes, exploring the enduring connection between two souls destined to find—and kill—each other in every incarnation. Laura Steven crafts a story that is simultaneously a fantasy epic, a meditation on love and fate, and a poignant exploration of what it means to be human in the face of immortality.
The premise is immediately captivating: Evelyn remembers all her past lives and knows that in each one, she dies before her eighteenth birthday at the hands of Arden, whose soul is mysteriously tethered to hers. In her current life as Branwen Blythe, she has an even more urgent reason to survive—her sister Gracie needs a bone marrow transplant that only Branwen can provide. This creates a perfect storm of tension as Evelyn races to save her sister while attempting to understand and break the ancient curse that binds her to her killer.
Intricate Worldbuilding Across Time and Space
Steven demonstrates remarkable versatility in creating distinctive settings across various historical periods. From the bone-chilling winters of Siberia to the sun-scorched deserts of North Africa, from the blood-soaked trenches of World War I to contemporary Wales, each era is painted with authentic details that ground the fantastical elements of the story.
The novel’s most impressive worldbuilding achievement is the Underrealm—a stark, haunting netherworld of bone trees and ash snow that serves as the spiritual epicenter of the protagonists’ curse. The author’s description of this realm as a place where “everything was too stark, too smooth, the ground like black glass and the trees like pale marble” creates a visceral sense of otherworldliness that contrasts effectively with the richly drawn historical settings.
However, the sheer number of time periods visited sometimes creates a disjointed reading experience. Some lifetimes receive only brief snapshots, leaving readers wanting more development in certain historical periods while feeling oversaturated in others.
Character Depth Across Multiple Lives
What truly elevates Our Infinite Fates is Steven’s ability to maintain consistent character identities while allowing them to evolve across their various incarnations. Evelyn and Arden remain recognizable souls regardless of the bodies they inhabit or the cultural contexts they navigate.
Evelyn emerges as a compelling protagonist—compassionate, determined, and perpetually hopeful despite the tragedies she endures life after life. Her eternal optimism in the face of seemingly inevitable doom forms the emotional core of the novel. As she explains in one poignant moment:
“I thought of my own pre-emptive grief, the way I doggedly rehearsed loss as though it somehow protected me from the inevitable pain, and I thought maybe Arden had a point. Almost everyone I had ever loved was dead, and the hurt never went away; I just learned to exist alongside it.”
Arden presents a fascinating counterpoint—guarded, stoic, and seemingly resigned to their deadly fate while harboring deep reservations about it. The gradual revelation of Arden’s motivations adds compelling layers to their character, transforming them from a mysterious antagonist to a complex figure trapped in the same cycle as Evelyn.
The relationship between these two characters develops with remarkable nuance across their various lifetimes, creating a love story that transcends traditional romance tropes. Their connection feels cosmic and inevitable without losing the intimate, human elements that make readers invest emotionally.
Thematic Richness and Philosophical Depth
At its heart, Our Infinite Fates is a meditation on several profound themes:
- The nature of love and its ability to persist beyond death
- The tension between fate and free will
- The meaning of identity when separated from time and physical form
- The burden and blessing of memory
- The quintessentially human capacity for hope in the face of inevitable loss
Steven weaves these philosophical threads throughout the narrative without ever becoming didactic. Instead, these ideas emerge organically through the characters’ experiences and reflections, adding intellectual depth to what might otherwise be a more straightforward fantasy romance.
Particularly powerful is the novel’s exploration of grief and memory. Evelyn’s ability to remember her past lives becomes both her greatest strength and her deepest source of pain, as she carries the weight of countless losses through each new existence.
Structural Strengths and Weaknesses
The novel’s structure—alternating between Evelyn’s present life and flashbacks to past incarnations—generally works well to gradually reveal the full scope of the curse and the relationship between the protagonists. The pacing is mostly effective, building tension as we approach both Evelyn’s eighteenth birthday and the revelation of why she and Arden are trapped in their eternal cycle.
However, the middle section occasionally feels repetitive, with multiple past lives demonstrating similar dynamics without significantly advancing the central mystery. Some readers may find themselves impatient to return to the present-day narrative during these extended flashbacks.
The final revelation—that Evelyn was originally a devil who made a deal with Arden—provides a satisfying explanation for their curse, though the mechanics of the Underrealm and its relationship to the mortal world sometimes feel underdeveloped. The confrontation with the Mother offers an emotionally resonant climax, but the rules governing her powers remain somewhat nebulous.
Prose That Shines Across Centuries
Laura Steven’s prose is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. She shifts effortlessly between different historical voices while maintaining a distinctive style that’s both lyrical and accessible. Her ability to capture the essence of each time period through subtle changes in vocabulary and sentence structure demonstrates remarkable versatility.
Particularly beautiful are the poems scattered throughout the text, ostensibly written by Arden across their many lifetimes. These pieces serve both as emotional touchstones and as thematic anchors, reinforcing the central ideas of the narrative in memorable, evocative language:
“life gives us grief like mounds of wet clay,
ripe and heavy beneath our reluctant hands,
and with it we can do one of three things.we can carry it with us wherever we go,
stooped beneath its awful weight,
we can shove it to the back of a wardrobe,
buried beneath an old waxed coat,
or we can make something beautiful,
and let it live on beyond us.”
Where Our Infinite Fates Stands in the Literary Landscape
Our Infinite Fates joins a growing subgenre of time-bending romances that explore love across different timelines and realities. It shares thematic DNA with works like V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War, though Steven’s approach to the concept of eternal love feels distinctively her own.
Fans of Steven’s previous young adult novels, including her award-winning The Exact Opposite of Okay and its sequel, will find a more mature, fantasy-oriented narrative here, though her signature blend of emotional depth and sharp observation remains intact.
Final Verdict: A Mesmerizing if Occasionally Uneven Epic
Our Infinite Fates is an ambitious, emotionally resonant novel that mostly succeeds in its lofty aims. While it occasionally struggles with pacing and some worldbuilding elements could be more thoroughly developed, these flaws are overshadowed by the book’s considerable strengths.
Steven has created a love story that feels both epic in scope and intensely personal, populated by characters whose struggles and hopes resonate across the centuries. The novel’s exploration of love, memory, and the human capacity for hope in the face of inevitable loss makes for a reading experience that lingers long after the final page.
Who Should Read This Book
- Fantasy readers who appreciate romance with substantial worldbuilding
- Fans of time-bending narratives and reincarnation stories
- Readers looking for LGBTQ+ representation in historical and contemporary settings
- Anyone who enjoys philosophical questions wrapped in an accessible narrative
The Final Word
In Our Infinite Fates, Laura Steven has crafted a story that feels both timeless and urgently contemporary, exploring eternal themes through the lens of an imaginative fantasy conceit. Despite occasional structural shortcomings, this novel offers a reading experience as rich and complex as the tapestry of lives it depicts—one well worth experiencing for readers ready to have their hearts broken and remade across the centuries.