The Everlasting

A mesmerizing tale of a knight and a historian, intertwined through fate and time. Sir Una Everlasting, the legendary knight of dominions history, who was said to be the peace bringer to dominion has to die (again) and Owen Mallory knows that; like a proper time travel novel, it skips back and forth, which is confusing in the beginning but it does serve a purpose: Together with Owen we keep repeating the same events over and over again, until you almost get sick of it: Then everything slowly starts to make sense and the cycles we repeat get more meaningful, until we reach the big, beautiful end, in which every question I had was answered with such a great sensibility for detail I was honestly stunned.

• historical fantasy • romantasy • timeloop / timetravel • female knight x failed soldier/struggling scholar • pure yearning on both sides • a full lenght novel following the shortstory / novella "The Six Deaths of the Saint" || a beautiful written, poetry novel about beginnings, endings, the past, the present and the future that might never happen. It's nearly a masterpiece. The idea and the writing is excellent, but I must say that there are a few instances that just irked me in a way I can't explain. This one will definitely not be the last Alix E. Harrow book I read. || "Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm. Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours." || “I loved you by then, or would soon, or always had. It was inevitable, foretold: When I look up, I will see the sky; when I fight, I will win; when I meet Owen Mallory, I will love him.”

History is bound to repeat itself, in this case literally. We follow a historian who gets sent back through time to tell the story of a knight turned hero. Only when he arrives in the past does he realize that living through history is, of course, much harder than writing about it. Determined to change the knight's fate, he winds up in a time loop. The Everlasting is a beautifully written, tragic standalone. The story that switches between a medieval and a more modern industrial setting, shows the importance of history and the power of love.