I had forgotten just how much I love Alix E. Harrow, especially her prose. I’ve read all of her novels and novellas and a few of her short stories, and this one is my favorite, which is interesting considering how much I typically don’t prefer to read about time travel. But her writing is great, and so was the story itself.
The novel is set in a fantasy world, and the timeline moves between present day and the past. Owen, one of the narrators, is a historian who focuses most of his work on Una Everlasting, a founding saint of his country of Dominion. He is tasked with going back in time to make sure that history happens as it was supposed to for the sake of Dominion, even if that means leading Una to her death. Very early on I was reminded of Harrow’s descriptive, poetic language (“I was a walking flinch” and “He had an extravagance of eyelashes”), but I was also struck by the humor in this one. Owen often displays a dry sense of humor, and there’s a running bit about an ancient horse that got me every time.
I did have to learn to go with the flow of the time travel. It’s partly explained, but at the end I still had questions about how it worked and why certain things were possible even in a reality in which time travel exists. I knew going in I might have trouble with it and would need to just stop thinking about it. While that was hard for me, the characters made it easier. Owen and Una could perhaps have been a little more fleshed out, but the story is about their relationship to each other and who they are versus who the world thinks they are, and even who they themselves think they are. I adored their relationship. The story is also about history, power, and storytelling, and there’s certainly a villain worth hating. But when I think about this book in the future, I’m going to be thinking about Owen and Una (and probably the horse). I absolutely recommend this.