Another book from my Hugo nominee reading list: "The Everlasting" is a story about trauma and healing that uses the aesthetics of romantasy, high fantasy and time travel tropes to explore how people respond in different ways to generational trauma and the experience of war. If you take away all the fantasy trappings, costumes, swords, dragons and fancy gold goblets – you still have a story about personal development and growth that can stand on its own two legs. The unreality is what makes the emotional reality possible.
To that point, I want to start by addressing the mechanisms and devices in this story – and how they function. If you want a full summary of the plot points, I recommend you check out the Bookish Goblin review.
On the surface - this is a portal / time loop fantasy. Much like the stones in “Outlander,” the traveler provides a sacrifice (blood instead of rubies and diamonds). The time loop just provides a rehearsal space for the characters to explore, practice and try on options that may help them grow past the trauma into agency and true strength. Some people might see plot holes – but I see space that allows the characters to grow and develop without over-explaining or over contextualizing. It also shares structural DNA with Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” – a protagonist cycling through iterations of the same events, accumulating experience toward a better outcome – except where Atkinson’s loops feel cosmic and fatalistic, Harrow’s have a villain actively pulling the levers. Think “Life After Life,” but if Hitler were actually the one in charge of the time leaps.
On the surface - Vivian Rolfe is a dime-store Geillis Duncan using Owen’s blood to force him to participate in repeated time loops so she can improve the scope and scale of her empire. As you go through the book – you’ll see that Vivian’s tragic flaw is her white-knuckle grip on her need to control, contrasted with the desire of pretty much all the other characters to experience personal development and find happiness and community.
Vivian is not simply a villain — she is the fourth traumatized character, and the one who never found her way to integration. She was herself a victim of reproductive violence at the hands of parents who sold her to a man who was supposed to mentor and protect her. The forced loss of Una didn't just wound her; it became the engine of a thousand-year project of control. But in trying to reclaim what was taken, she recreates the same dynamic with her own daughter: Una is parentified, weaponized, and used as a tool to serve Vivian's ends — which is precisely what was done to Vivian. She cannot break the cycle. This is what makes her genuinely tragic rather than merely monstrous: she understands loss and grief as intimately as Owen or Una, but has channeled it entirely outward into empire rather than inward toward integration. The contrast with Owen and Una's arc isn't moral superiority — it's that they were lucky enough to find each other.
This book has a ton of violence – every form of -cide you can name is represented, along with xenophobia, bigotry and ableism. It’s not gratuitous death for shock value but emblematic of the emotional reality of a society built on war and domestic violence. Nobody is just throwing a baby out the window of a moving train or needlessly abusing characters in senseless ways.
Below the surface, there’s a whole complex world of narrative archetypes (thinking of Jung and Campbell here). Both Una and Owen represent dynamic characters seeking to transform their fates while Vivian and Owen’s father, Mr. Mallory the elder, Owen’s colleagues are more static. Una’s transformation from Red Knight (Warrior) to Green Knight (healer), Owen’s limerence (Lover) to love (Caregiver/Sage) arc. A case could be made for Vivian as the Shadow, but also the time loop representing Shadow work (repetition until integration) with the manuscript as creator/magician and the ending as “Self” representing integration & possibility.
There’s a lot more going on in this book than meets the eye in the love, sex and parenting department as well, so let’s talk about those dualities. Owen brings head-over-heels limerence to his interactions with Una – and she is avoidant. We’re talking about two people who are war veterans. They are responding to their trauma in very different ways that represent the two sides of a coin. Hero-worshipping Owen wants to atone, he wants to please and he wants to do whatever it takes to create balanceOwen begins in pure Tennov territory: idealizing, projecting, self-erasing (calling himself a coward more times than I can count) and confusing caretaking with connection. His shaking hands, and the wound kept open on his left hand through neglect and lack of self-care, reflect this self-erasure in the body as much as in words. But by the end, his love shifts from: “I need you to need me” to “I want you to be free, even if it costs me everything.”
Una is avoidant – she lives in the woods, she bathes in cold springs instead of hot water in the local bath house, and uses her ambiguous sexuality as a shield against intimacy. Their sex isn’t BDSM or kink but a reflection of their individual trauma responses as soldiers/warriors: Una’s roughness is armor. Their combat responses are equally revealing – Owen claims repeatedly to be a coward but is the best marksman under pressure, what reads as dissociation under threat; Una reacts without a second thought against aggressors. Their sexual intimacy evolves only when they do, across a nine-year gap from Vivian’s trauma engine – not in a single cathartic scene but incrementally, almost imperceptibly, which is how trauma recovery actually works. They don’t become “old marrieds” with “vanilla” sex – they are learning to connect and communicate physically in a way that doesn’t need to serve trauma they no longer choose to carry.
As the Red Knight, Una is obedient, weaponized and emotionally stunted. Una is devoted to serving her queen, cut off from others emotionally, disconnected from herself physically, disconnected from the community around her. As the Green Knight, she pens stray sheep, negotiates for an extra blanket for Owen because she knows he sleeps cold, protects dragons, and introduces Owen as the bravest man she knows to knowledge seekers. She becomes a person capable of care, not just violence.
This novel traces the untreated combat trauma of three characters: Owen, Una, and Mr. Mallory the elder – without explicitly labeling their emotional, psychological, or physical behaviors (self-harm, alcohol, violence, acquiescence, sleep disturbances) as untreated PTSD. The absence of that clinical language is historically accurate; the condition had no name in this world. But the behaviors are precise and recognizable.
Owen mirrors Una in this transformation – he chooses death over reenacting trauma, peace over glory and refuses to perpetuate war. He shows soldiers the yew tree and gives them a 100 year leap forward away from the war. The multiple versions of events or stories are a critical porousness to the growth of the characters. Owen’s development as a parent is arguably a less messy but more complicated version of his father’s own attempt at reconciling with his deeds as a soldier. Mr. Mallory the elder picks up baby Owen from the battleground and keeps him, but struggles against a culture of war as an activist and radical, raising Owen to be a scholar. He suffers and self-medicates with alcohol – a medical reality of untreated combat trauma – but he loves his adopted son purely: “Would prefer to disown you in person, so don’t die. Love, Dad.” and even loves Owen despite his “nationalist” leanings.
Una likewise experiences an arc in relation to parenting – while Vivian Rolfe is technically her mother, Una was parentified at a very early age and raised to be a tool to allow Vivian to meet her own ends. Her reservations about becoming a mother are real and deep, amplified by her experiences as a soldier: she has spent her entire adult life as a weapon, trained to hurt rather than protect. And yet during the nine-year break from Vivian’s trauma engine, she appears to be doing it remarkably well – which is itself a quiet triumph the book doesn’t need to announce.
Owen becomes a person capable of love, not just limerence. Una is capable of gentleness and great intimacy. For both of them – the pinnacle is not the romance or parenthood but refusing to repeat the cycle and accepting themselves and each other, but not letting the past define either.
And then, of course, we come to the resurrection. That is not a super tidy “happily ever after” – it’s a long period of waiting for Una. I read this as a metaphor for Owen deciding “I can’t repeat this pattern,” going off for some self-examination and returning by choice to Una’s side. It’s a metaphysical renewal, one that requires patience, work and leaving open the possibility. Even the final page of the book winks at the possibility that Owen is still using the yew to move through time to drop off manuscript copies and renew library books. This signals healing and re-entering the “real” world, as a fully integrated person, with intimate relationships with partner and children.
There are a few other issues I’d like to cover, including the use of names. The way that names have power and how Owen hides Una’s “real” name reminds me a lot of “A Wizard of Earthsea.” In fact, so much of the hero’s journey of Una and Owen to integrate their shadow selves echoes LeGuin’s story (including the dragons!). There’s also a lot of xenophobia or lightly described racism of fair-haired folk against travelers (or “geweth”) with dark, often curly, hair.
There are a few nods toward normalizing non-heteronormativity: Gilda & Sylvie’s relationship is sometimes clandestine, sometimes open; Una’s woodcutter father becomes two fathers in a later iteration, and Mr. Mallory the elder lives in a polycule with the barkeep and her husband. In some versions of the story that Owen creates, he demonstrates conscious erasure of these things to increase general acceptance of a story. Rather than this being outright erasure, I think it’s more of self-editing that he was doing at that point in the story to make himself more meek, and acceptable to those around him as his form of fitting in to a culture he doesn’t necessarily believe in to avoid the difficult fate of his father.
As any good historian will tell you – there are often many versions of any story. By the end of the book, Owen is seeding short fables everywhere he goes without creating “Big Story” that can be used to inspire nationalism, but rather inspire a values-based culture. Owen and Una are free of the trauma engine because they chose to loop on life, connection and possibility rather than external expectations.
Limerence
Veterans - PTSD & Suicide Prevention
