The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow * * * * *
On the surface, this could be described as a love story, but that barely scratches the surface of what the novel is actually doing. At its heart, The Everlasting is a story about national identity, history, myth making, and the stories countries tell about themselves. It asks how those stories shape not only the way we see the past, but also the future we create. It is a surprisingly ambitious novel, one that explores ideas much bigger than its central romance.
The story begins with Owen Mallory, a historian who has spent years studying the legendary knight Una Everlasting, one of the founding heroes of the nation of Dominion. When his research draws him far closer to the legend than he ever expected, the novel gradually unfolds into something much larger than a fantasy adventure. It becomes a story where history, myth, and time are intertwined, and where the stories a nation chooses to preserve can become just as powerful as the events themselves. The structure reminded me a little of Groundhog Day, not because the plots are the same, but because the story keeps circling back to familiar moments, each time revealing something new. To really understand what this novel is about, we have to follow the characters on that journey. As they slowly uncover the relationship between the myths formed in the past and the future those myths create, the novel reveals its true purpose.
That exploration of national narratives was the aspect that fascinated me the most. Every country has stories it tells about itself. Founding myths, legendary figures, historical moments that become part of a national identity. Yet those stories are never completely fixed. We constantly reinterpret the past through the eyes of the present, deciding which events deserve to be remembered, celebrated, questioned, or forgotten. Reading this in today's political climate felt especially relevant, particularly when thinking about the United States and the ongoing debates surrounding the Founding Fathers, the Pilgrims, Manifest Destiny, and what America believes its own origins represent. Because the United States has such enormous political, cultural, and military influence, the narratives it builds around its own history affect far more than just Americans.
The novel also examines the human cost of trying to build greatness. Every attempt to create a stronger nation comes with sacrifices, and more often than not it is ordinary people who pay the price. History may celebrate victories and legends, but it is usually written in the blood of countless unnamed people. The book quietly asks whether the pursuit of greatness is worth that cost, and whether the world might be a better place if nations were content simply existing instead of constantly striving for power.
Alongside these larger ideas is a deeply personal story about two soldiers carrying profound trauma. Both struggle with the weight of everything they have done, the lives they have taken, and whether it is possible to live with that guilt. Their shared experiences create a believable emotional connection, and their relationship feels less like a conventional romance than two damaged people trying to find a way forward together.
This is also a difficult book to review without spoiling it, because so much of what makes it remarkable comes from gradually discovering what it is really trying to say. The further the story progresses, the more each revelation reframes everything that came before it.
I would absolutely recommend The Everlasting to readers who enjoy thoughtful speculative fiction that explores history, identity, and politics through fantasy. It asks big questions without offering easy answers, and it trusts the reader to wrestle with them. Long after I finished the final page, I found myself thinking less about the time travel itself and more about the stories we choose to tell about our past, because those stories may ultimately decide our future.
Quotes
I wanted to highlight two quotes from The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow that have stayed with me ever since I finished the book.
«"It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone."»
That last sentence is incredibly important.
Every story serves someone.
And then Harrow follows it up with this:
«"That's not history. That's a story, designed to teach us who to hate and who to obey, what god to worship and what flag to fight for and what color eyes are the most beautiful. It's a story that made a continent into a kingdom into an empire."»
To me, these two quotes are the heart of the novel.
History is never just a collection of facts. It's also the story we choose to tell about those facts. Which events become important? Which people become heroes? Which parts get forgotten? Every generation reshapes that story, and every version serves someone's interests.
Take Christianity as an example.
Hungary wasn't originally a Christian nation. We were pagan until Christianity was adopted about a thousand years ago, largely because it allowed the kingdom to integrate with the Christian states surrounding it.
The United States wasn't founded as a Christian nation either. That's simply a historical fact reflected in its founding documents. Yet today, many politicians and commentators insist that America is, and always has been, a Christian nation.
Why?
Because stories serve someone.
The story a nation tells about its origins shapes how people understand their identity today. It influences who belongs, who doesn't, what values are considered "traditional," and even which political goals seem legitimate.
That's why I found these quotes so powerful. The Everlasting isn't just talking about a fictional kingdom. It's asking us to think about the stories our own countries tell us and to ask a simple question:
Who benefits from that story?
I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
⚠️ Spoiler Discussion
The character I found by far the most fascinating was Vivian. I liked Owen and Una, and I was invested in their story, but whenever Vivian was on the page I wanted to know more. She is really the character through whom the novel explores its biggest ideas.
What struck me most is that everything begins with a girl who has almost no agency. She is sold into a king's household as a child, groomed and sexually abused by a man she even calls her “teacher”, and ultimately used as little more than a tool. She grows up in a world where women are told they can never rule, never matter, never shape history. Looking at it from that perspective, I completely understood where her rage came from. Her desire to prove that she could become the greatest ruler the world had ever seen felt tragically understandable.
The tragedy is that, over time, her understandable anger slowly turns into obsession.
I actually don't think Vivian started out as a monster. There are hints that she genuinely tried to build something better. She talks about treaties and peace, and I believe she probably wanted to create a world where women would never again suffer what she suffered. But the world she lives in rewards conquest, strength, and domination. One person's good intentions, even those of a queen, can only accomplish so much inside a system built on violence. Eventually she becomes convinced that the only solution is more control, more manipulation, and more rewriting of history.
That is what makes her such an interesting villain. She isn't driven by simple greed or cruelty. She genuinely believes she can perfect history if she just gets one more chance. One more revision. One more adjustment. One more timeline. She spends what could literally be thousands, perhaps even millions, of years trying to create the perfect future, and somewhere along the way she loses sight of the people living inside those histories.
I also found myself trying to untangle exactly how her time travel worked, and I don't think the novel gives us a complete answer. My own interpretation is that she repeatedly travelled backwards and forwards using the yew book, constantly checking the future before returning to change something else. We know she appears throughout history under different identities, that every queen of Dominion is actually Vivian, and that she carefully shapes events across centuries. We also know she manipulates Owen into becoming the historian who writes Una's story. What isn't completely clear is the order in which all of this happened. Did she first perfect the succession of queens before beginning to manipulate Owen's and Una's timelines? Or did she keep jumping backwards and forwards, constantly adjusting events until everything aligned? I actually enjoyed not having all the answers. After so many centuries of rewriting history, Vivian has become almost mythical herself, and even her own timeline is impossible to reconstruct.
One revelation I particularly loved was that Una is Vivian's daughter, because it completely changes the way you look at Vivian's actions. Looking back, I kept wondering how much of Una's life had been orchestrated. Did Vivian arrange for Una to be found and raised where she was? Did she deliberately engineer the deaths of her adoptive fathers? Did she allow herself to be captured so Una would rescue her? The novel never spells these things out, but it leaves enough clues that it becomes fascinating to speculate.
Vivian spends centuries proving that women can rule, yet the myth she ultimately creates is not about a woman ruling. It is about a woman sacrificing herself so that another woman can rule. Una becomes the legendary hero, the woman who gives everything for queen and country, and that sacrifice becomes the moral foundation of Dominion. Every future queen derives her legitimacy from Una's legend, while Una herself is the ultimate martyr.
That contradiction says so much about Vivian. Even after everything she suffered as a young woman, even after dedicating centuries to proving that women deserve power, she still builds a national narrative that asks another woman, her own daughter, to give everything for the state. It is almost as though she cannot escape the very system that shaped her.
I also think Vivian's obsession ultimately comes back to the man who first destroyed her life. Everything she does feels like an attempt to prove him wrong. She was told women could never rule, so she creates a line of queens that lasts for centuries. She was treated as powerless, so she seeks absolute control over history itself. Ironically, in trying to break free from the cycle of oppression, she ends up creating another cycle that demands endless sacrifice.
Another detail I loved was the revelation about the dragons. At first it simply seems cruel that she drove them to extinction, but once we learn what dragons made possible, it suddenly makes perfect sense. As long as dragons existed, someone else might have discovered the same power she did and challenged everything she had built. Destroying them was not simply an act of cruelty. It was the final step in protecting her monopoly over history itself.
When Vivian finally dies, I actually felt a little sorry for her. Not because I forgave everything she had done, but because she seemed exhausted. Imagine carrying the memories of thousands of years, of countless failed futures, of endlessly trying to perfect history only to realise it can never be perfected.
And in the end, despite everything she did, the wars still happen.
That, to me, is the novel's final message. History can be rewritten. Myths can be rewritten. Nations can rewrite the stories they tell about themselves. But human nature remains stubbornly the same. Vivian spent an eternity trying to build the perfect future through power and war, but only compounded on the endless misery that the wars reoccurring create. It also proves that one person can't influence the future to be better than the past. Perhaps, had she built a team around her that would influence not one nation to be more powerful, but for every nation to not want to be powerful, that would have shaped a better future overall. But that's just my own idea, what I would have done in her stead, hoping for a kinder, more gentle future where maybe a nation's myth isn't about being powerful or great, but about being good.
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