The Everlasting - Alix E. Harrow - ★★★

AUTHOR: Alix E. Harrow

NARRATORS: Moira Quirk and Sid Sagar

GENRE: Fantasy-Romance.

PUBLICATION DATE: October 28, 2025

RATING: 3 stars.

In a Nutshell: A standalone adult fantasy with an accurate tagline: ‘A Legend. A Lie. A Love Story’. Exceptional idea. Interesting but somewhat flat characters. An overly complex execution. Repetitive because of the POV choice. I adored the concept but wish the execution had worked better for me. Not my favourite Harrow novel, though I can see it working better for some readers, especially those who want more romance than fantasy.

Plot Preview:

Owen Mallory, a cowardly ex-soldier and a historian, has always been fascinated by the legend of Sir Una Everlasting, Dominion’s greatest knight whose legend lives on as one of the bravest servers of queen and country. Not much is known about her actual life except for what’s written in the ballads. When Owen finds a book that claims to know Una’s actual story, he doesn’t realise how much of her story is a part of his story as well. He is sent to traverse through time till he meets Una, not knowing that their interaction is doomed to repeat over and over, unless they do something to break the cycle.

The story comes to us in the first-person perspectives of Owen and Una, with each POV getting one lifetime’s iteration until it shifts to the other character and the next lifetime. Both POVs are written addressing the other character directly as ‘you’. (Technically, this isn't second-person, though it is tagged as such in some reviews.)

I have loved Alix E. Harrow’s prose ever since I read ‘The Ten Thousand Doors of January’. Not that all her works were instant favourites of mine. ‘Starling House’ was strictly average, while her short stories ‘The Six Deaths of the Saint’ and ‘The Knight and the Butcherbird’ were exceptional. But in each work, her creativity and her lyrical writing are strongly visible. This book is no exception.

At first, this book sounds like an extended version of ‘The Six Deaths of the Saint’, even beyond the similarity to the title ‘The Many Deaths of Una Everlasting’. Both works talk of a female knight with immense bravery, seemingly endless lives and a blind duty to her liege and country, which made me picture Gwendoline Christie in her ‘Brienne of Tarth’ avatar yet again, this time as ‘Una Everlasting’. But that’s all that the story and the novel have in common.

It is tough to review this book without spoiling it and the blurb is already too detailed. So I’ll keep the rest of my feedback vague.

Bookish Yays:

🎖️ The concept. Mindblowing! To some extent, it feels like a gender-swapped King Arthur story. It even has Arthurian Easter Eggs.

🎖️ The prose: Lyrical without being purple.

🎖️ Una Everlasting: an outstanding character. Loved seeing the human underneath the knight, albeit these are only brief glimpses.

🎖️ The imaginary country named Dominion, based on an alternate-history version of England during the Middle Ages. Not much detailed but interesting nonetheless. Enjoyed the commingling of real-life history with this hypothetical version.

🎖️ The exemplification of several valid real-world themes, such as how a person becomes a myth, how a leader can be blind to everything except power, and how heroes can be idealised far beyond what they deserve. The handling of these themes is the best part of the novel.

Bookish Okays:

🛡 Owen Mallory: a tough character to relate to at first but he does improve somewhat as the plot proceeds. I wish we could understand his psyche better.

🛡 The structure. The book first plays out from Owen’s POV. At the end of his cycle, a certain incident triggers a shift to Una’s POV and we see the same events yet again. This happens multiple times, and is partly justified because of the time loop, but it feels boring and repetitive. The second half thankfully does somewhat better.

🛡 The swapped gender roles – with Una being tall, courageous and masculine, and Owen being dainty and risk-averse – are interesting at first, but some inclusions are a bit awkward as well. I wish there had been a clearer portrayal of their genders. (not necessarily in the traditional binary; just clearer in whatever identity they belonged to.)

🛡 The ending. Probably the best part of the book but too rushed and crams in so much!

Bookish Nays:

⚔ The choice of writing the first-person from one POV addressing the other person. After the back-and-forth swaps, it gets tricky at times to remember if the ‘you’ is Una or Owen. An ordinary first-person voice would have been easier, even if the reason for the writing choice made some sense after later reveals.

⚔ The plot is so very confusing! It is tricky to keep track of all the iterations and the developments of each. Having a minimal number of characters helps as well as restricts.

⚔ The romance. Feels utterly forced. As this is an adult romantasy, I guess a part of this can be excused. But the chemistry between the leads is almost zero. It’s weird to read their explicit scenes when we can't even see why they are together.

⚔ Way too much telling, especially in Owen’s POV, as if he can't be trusted to have control on his narrative.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at 13 hrs 41 min, is narrated by Moira Quirk and Sid Sagar. Honestly, they both are fabulous and do perfect justice to their characters. Despite that, I would strongly recommend against the audio. The magical realism and time loop is so deeply interwoven within the more ordinary aspects of the plot that the story is fairly intricate to follow. Despite my 6+ years of audio listening experience, I had to rewind this audio multiple times to figure out what was happening. I cannot recommend this format, especially to audio newbies.

Overall, this is not a bad book at all, especially in terms of its concept. But the lopsided tilt towards romance instead of fantasy and the overly complicated plot affected my experience.

Mine is a slightly outlier review. You might enjoy the book more if you enjoy darker romances filled with yearning and passion and a dash of time travel.

Recommended to NA Romantasy fans.

My thanks to Tor Publishing Group and Tor Books for providing the DRC of “The Everlasting” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.