The Everlasting

Catching up on the Hugo noms for this year, I picked up Alix Harrow's The Everlasting, a time loop-esque narrative about empires and the power of stories. Owen Mallory is a historian that has been researching Una the Everlasting who gets sent back to Una's time to write a good story about her to make the future country stronger.

One narrative issue with time loop stories is that they get repetitive in their structure. The reader has already seen the scenes, and something needs to shift to keep them fresh. (Sometimes you can lean into that discomfort for narrative reasons like In Stars and Time, but I think that would work less in a written format.) What works quite well for me in this book, is that the first time we see everything through Owen's perspective, who is coming in with his own biases about who Una is and is trying to learn about the world (along with the reader). The second time through we get Una's perspective, which is much different and delightfully directly refutes a lot of Owen's misperceptions.

As a warning, I will say that this story leans on Arthurian legend—the book Mallory is reading/writing is called The Death of Una Everlasting. It's not a direct retelling (thank goodness), but it does take a number of names, characters, and ideas and kind of smears them around to tell a new story. Personally, I think these direct references aren't necessary as the story stands well enough on its own, but I'm a bit of a hater on the Arthur front. These bits were blurry enough (and the story fresh enough) that I could squint and enjoy it.

Overall, I really liked this novel. There's a lot of good details early on that seem like innocuous character building but are instead well-laid foreshadowing. Love some romantic yearning. Lots of fun, quite grippy, would recommend.

They left even their sexes behind, dressing sometimes as two men or two women, binding or stuffing their chests, lengthening or shortening their stride. This, at least, came easily to them, for neither of them had ever quite been what they were supposed to be, or acted how they ought to act. They were too manly or too womanish, too loud or too soft-spoken, too tall or too slim, too strong or too weak. It was no hardship to trade one disguise for another.

This is a side comment, as this isn't really a story centered on gender, but it does have some interesting things going in that department all the same.

Owen and Una both feel like they are "doing a poor impression of what they are" and live outside gendered expectations. It's a good contrast to Vivian, who feels imprisoned, and whose goals are entirely rooted in gendered reasons (or at least the way other people treat her for it).

There was a certain pleasure, God knew, in following orders, in placing the heavy reins of your life in somebody else's hands. All your sins were not truly yours, then; all your unruly desires were safely curbed.

Also, incredibly minorly, but I appreciated this moment of kink that felt well-earned from a story and character perspective.