The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

Format: Audio (BorrowBox)
Read: September 2026

Is now the time that I just accept that I am not the audience for this type of book? The Everlasting is Romantasy, but I will concede that it is one of the better ones. It is decently written; it is more than some loosely strung-together tropes; it tries to do something different with gender expectations, and there is at least some gesturing towards theme. I can appreciate that the author was trying to do something here, but if I’m being generous, I’ll say she might have been hamstrung by writing to a particular market… which, in fairness, and for better or worse, is the one that is apparently buying the books these days. Authors do need to make money, I guess.

But this book has won Hugo and Locus Awards this year, and I keep seeing it being hyped, which is why I read it – so I am going to be harsh on it because I feel like I was duped about what this is!

I am just really frustrated with this book because it has a premise with a huge amount of potential. A mixed-race historian sent back through time who meets the subject of his study in real life, a legendary female knight, and they are both trapped in a magical time loop being controlled by a female villain literally constructing a History that strengthens her own fascist regime… imagine what could be done with all that! In the hands of a writer who is actually interested in exploring the available themes, this could have been a profound and beautiful story.

Instead, it’s just hollow sentiment with threadbare world-building, flat characters and an unconvincing romance, prettied up with the kind of “poetic” flowery language that seems to be enough to dazzle some readers (I guess also see The Song of Achilles, which I am still confused over why/how people think it’s so great). The time travel mechanic is also poorly explained, though personally I’m ok with a bit of hand-waving around that sort of thing.

It reminded me of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, also really overrated (IMO) and a waste of potential that is prettied up with purplish prose. Coincidentally, it is also a time-based plot, but I’m even more annoyed with The Everlasting one because it is such an interesting idea.

Is this “Romantasy”? I don’t know; what does that even mean any more – is a Romantasy really just a copy-and-paste of ACOTAR with a few tweaks? The Everlasting is fantasy, and it is (so-called) romance, and the two are inseparable, and honestly, the novel is not interested in exploring any of its other elements to claim it’s about much more than that. It does try to do something more original, though, by playing with gender expectations – we’ve got a soft, small, skinny, nerdy man (yet still has dark, curly hair; why do they always have tousled curly hair?) who cries a lot and a tall, muscular, brave and violent woman. I don’t think it does this well... in fact, it sort of implies that they’re both a bit kinky, and Una is bisexual, and I guess that’s how they manage to be attracted to each other as such physical opposites, as a feminine man and masculine woman?

That is the impression I was left with because we never see these characters fall in love, and so their romance doesn’t make any sense. Owen already has a hard-on for the idea of Sir Una The Everlasting before he meets her in real life, which makes it read as kind of creepy obsession. This book is supposed to be about closing that gap, that he gets to know the real woman – who is not perfectly beautiful and golden like the illustrations – and actually falls in love… but we never see this. We don’t get any meaningful scenes of them getting to know each other and gradually falling in love. We just get told that it happened, and I never believed it.

And because I never believed their attraction to each other, the clumsily inserted sex scenes – which are fairly graphic – were both boring and really off-putting. I really don’t think they were needed at all either, and the fact that they were included is another indication it was written for the market. Books these days apparently have to have “spicy” scenes, even if they’re worse for it.

I also think the fact that the sex scenes are in there is fucking weird because of the narrative framing for this story! The whole thing is written in first-person perspective, something else I wish we could just stop with. It is very difficult to pull off, and it traps you inside the head of a single character so you never get a true picture of them within their world, or the world around them. I personally only enjoy it when it’s being used as a literary device to play with unreliable narration. Even worse, at a later stage in the book, the narrative ends up being a first-person, second-person perspective, where Owen is explicitly addressing Una instead of a general reader – so why is he describing their sex scenes?!

Most of the book is Owen’s POV, with some parts of Una’s. I listened to the audio version, and I had a hard time with Owen’s narrator (Sid Sagar). I found the offhand, irreverent tone he read with to be very irritating. Moria Quirk (narrator of The Locked Tomb series) read Una and was better, but those are small parts of the book.

The other problem with the narrative is that, as a time-loop story, it’s really repetitive. There are ways to write a time loop that don’t retread exactly the same scenes in the same way, that don’t bore the reader, but Alix Harrow apparently doesn’t know how to do that. The start of the book is particularly brutal with this; it’s a bit better in the second half, but unfortunately we enter into a new pattern of repetitive prose where we might not be literally walking through the same scenes, but we are still covering the same ground over and over (why do authors of these sorts of books like to repeatedly describe hair and eyes of their characters?). I do not want to hear “Wait for me under the yew tree” ever again (or “always”, for that matter).

While the narrative is first-person POV, somehow the characters remain flat and lacking in defined personality. Una especially never comes off the page; I don’t know her, and I definitely don’t understand her… and I don’t believe Owen does either. She is a prop in Vivian’s scheme, and she’s just an object for Owen’s obsession. There are a handful of secondary characters – Owen’s Dad, Professor Sawbridge, Sir Ansel – who are even more dimensionless and only exist to very explicitly prop up themes.

Owen himself doesn’t make sense to me. He’s mixed race, which means he has darker skin and dark curly hair, in a vaguely fascist white society that is always at war with outsiders that look like him. He was brought up by a single white father, and knows nothing about his mother. He appears to have no real curiosity about this mother, who he presumably looks like, nor does he suffer any racism. He seems to suffer most for being a soft-boy nerdy academic! When he goes back in time, nothing significant is made of how he looks different, nor does he struggle at all with the reality of a medieval civilisation. He doesn’t even nerd out as a historian in the time period he’s studying!

Harrow just does fuck all with any of the characters; they are a bundle of traits instead of living, breathing people.

There is no subtlety in this book. Everything is spelt out, repeatedly. It’s entirely telling with no showing. Characters will literally state whatever shallow thematic point the author wants to make, and they’ll say it more than once. History is a construct; it’s made up of only the stories that survive. Authoritarian regimes rely on stories from the past. Love can make us stronger and more vulnerable. Themes are not interesting if you’re just writing them on giant signs and waving them in my face for 5 seconds on the way back around the loop to the sentimental mush.

I could also get into how the time-loop magic stuff doesn’t make sense (it’s implied other people have been through it and feel the effects of it, including Sawbridge, but that goes fucking nowhere!)… Or the problematic feminist ideas (a woman can only be powerful if she’s even more ruthless and violent than men?), but I could go on forever picking at this… and I’ve got a holiday to pack for (and 2 more book reviews to write!).

So much wasted potential: a killer premise wasted on mushy, hollow sentimentality that is boring to read.

Maybe I’m more annoyed than usual because I’ve been reading modern classics lately, books written by authors that know how to construct something with a sense of authenticity and meaning… and in contrast, this sort of thing is empty and depressing.

The worst thing is, this doesn’t even count for anything in Law of Fives! At least it was a free library audiobook. I didn’t waste any money or too much time. If it had been print, I would have dropped it as a DNF!