Our Infinite Fates - Laura Steven - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Laura Steven

NARRATOR: Sofia Oxenham

GENRE: Fantasy-Romance.

PUBLICATION DATE: February 27, 2025

RATING: 2.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A YA Fantasy-Romance about a couple stuck in an endless loop of love and murder over thousands of years. Interesting story, but gets a bit tedious after a while. The time periods are nicely varied, but not explored much due to the restrictions of the plotline. The character development is almost non-existent. The reveal is disappointing. Might work better for YA readers as it does offer all the *feels* of young romance.

Plot Preview:

Evelyn remembers most of her lives, but not the earliest ones as they are hazy. However, one thing she knows for certain: in every life, Arden murders her just before her eighteenth birthday and that he too dies on the same day. Oh, and she also knows that she has strong romantic feelings for him despite his being her killer. (Please picture middle-aged me rolling my eyes as I wrote this line.) All these years, she has tried various methods of escaping her fate, but nothing has worked. But her present life – in Wales, 2022 with a loving mother and a sweet but sick younger sister Gracie – has her longing to stay beyond the deadline. (See what I did there? 😎) Can she convince Arden to stop his murderous tendencies?

The story comes to us in Evelyn’s first-person perspective over two broad alternating timelines: one being the fixed present-time of 2022 and the other moving in reverse chronological order through the various years where Evelyn and Arden met the end of their *infinite fates*.

This book started off wonderfully, and I began harbouring hopes of finally hitting the elusive high-star rating for a YA novel. But my rating dipped in direct proportion with the progress percentage. The ending ensured that there was no way of salvaging its final low position. I took this book more for the Fantasy than for the Romance, but both ended up somewhat below par.

FWIW, the blurb calls this “'The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue’ meets ‘This is How You Lose The Time War’”. I haven’t read either of those novels, so I cannot make any comparisons. I can only hope that those two books go better than this one for me as they both are in my TBR.

Bookish Yays:

🕰 The concept. Souls stuck in an infinite loop of loving each other over centuries – we’ve seen many times. But killing each other as well? I think that’s a first. It’s like an exploration of reincarnation and fate with the garnishing of murder.

🕰 The fact that the two main characters are not stuck to a particular gender across their lifespans. This offers a lovely novelty in what would otherwise have been a typical girl-boy love story.

🕰 Evelyn’s mother and her sister Gracie in the 2022 timeline. The only characters for whom I actually felt something and who shone even in their limited roles. (Trigger alert for Gracie’s illness: she needs a bone marrow transplant and the details aren’t easy to read.)

🕰 The cover – stunning in every way!

Bookish Okays:

⌛ The timeline with all of Evelyn’s lives (deaths?). The history buff in me was delighted to see so many distinct places and eras going back more than a thousand years (Nice to see Mumbai making an appearance too, albeit a blink-and-you-miss-it one.) However, I also felt like it went everywhere without going anywhere, as if there was a checklist of interesting locations and years from across the world and it was being ticked one by one. At the start, we get to see Evelyn’s thoughts on some changes she has seen in the world across the centuries, but this stops after a while. Because of the focus being only on the characters’ deaths, we don’t get to experience much of any of those places/eras.

⌛ The prose is quite lush, and I am sure younger romance readers will enjoy all those passionate declarations of everlasting love. Take a call based on this simple test: On reading lines such as “Like the sway of the sea and the tug of the tides, love is a moving, eternal thing.[…] Each time our souls meet, let us submerge our bodies in the bright blue cold, and let the waves make us anew” OR “Hearts have their ways. Every atrium, every ventricle, every vein and artery will beat for you”, will you go 😍 or 🙄? Sadly, such lines do nothing for me at this age, so I am in 🙄 camp.

⌛ The blandness. This is partly due to the repetition of the love-kill situation, but that is anyway to be expected given the looping nature of the base concept. What surprised me more is the lack of a fresh feel despite the novelty of the plot idea. The pizzazz is absent.

Bookish Nays:

⏰ The immature behaviour of the leads. I know they both are supposed to be only seventeen, but considering they have both lived more than a thousand years, surely there has to be some sensibility in their thoughts? Their character development is sorely lacking.

⏰ The annoyingly long time for which Arden refuses to tell Evelyn the reason for his behaviour. It was such a lazy extension of the story. It was tough to accept that Evelyn conveniently forgot the reason for Arden’s murdering her and the initiation of their relationship but remembered everything else.

⏰ The romance. We see a lot of thoughts about attraction, but the depth is missing. As the multiple historical timelines focus more on their deaths than on their love, we don’t even see any evolution of their relationship. As such, Evelyn’s constant monologues about her attraction towards her soulmate are irksome. The extra dose of steam in the final section is also not merited.

⏰ The big reveal. Considering how 2022 gets a proper complete timeline, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is the timeline where everything can get sorted out for the duo. But what a ridiculous sorting-out it is! I don’t think I have ever been so bewildered at a fictional revelation. (I re-played the disclosure scene thrice on audio to see if I had misheard anything!) It was such a deus-ex-machina finale that it killed my rating. The instant solution and the infodumping also didn’t help, even if the epilogue was somewhat decent.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at 11 hrs 13 min, is narrated by Sofia Oxenham. Sher’s an actress, so she obviously knows her way around enunciation and emoting and handles the narration extremely well. However, there are two timelines, with the historical one going in reverse order. Moreover, the story by its very nature is a bit repetitive. So if you zone out easily, no audio version for you! Audio newbies, better stick to actual reading.

Overall, I did like the book somewhat at the start, but given the potential of that premise, I can’t help feeling the loss of what could have been. I might still have forgiven many of the issues because the book caters to a YA audience, and I am at least a generation above that age group. However, the ending with its out-of-the-blue reveal pushed me towards annoyance.

Given the passionate sentiments of the characters, perhaps upper-YA Romance readers will feel differently about this book. If youngsters do pick this up, I hope they find the ending much more convincing.

Recommended to upper-YA Fantasy-Romance readers who are more impressed by love than logic.

2.5 stars, rounding down wherever applicable for the ending.

My thanks to St. Martin's Press and Wednesday Books for the DRC and to Macmillan Audio for the ALC of “Our Infinite Fates” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.