I’m gonna start with a blanket spoiler warning, and also this: If you haven’t read The Everlasting, don’t look at any of the graphics, or anything I’ve written past this point, because nearly every sentence could be a spoiler, if taken in parts or sum. Just know that this book is excruciatingly good and you should read it, without knowing anything… else about it, if at all possible. If you have read The Everlasting, come, follow me into what’s probably already the beginnings of lifelong obsession, if we’re being honest – I don’t let go of things easily, or ever, and when it comes to extraordinarily good books, I don’t even feel the least bit guilty about it.
It’s such a timely, powerful piece about propaganda, our reliance on myths – to our benefit & our detriment -, both as a people and as individuals, that you can almost be forgiven for overlooking it’s actually also poetry and fairy tale, heartbreaking love story & message of true hope.
When I say this is timely, it’s with the full knowledge that the reemergence of high fantasy as a popular genre, generally, and mythical retellings more specifically, has not occurred in a vacuum – That escapism in times of great conflict, and the deconstructing/reconstructing systemic cultural underpinnings through great literature is timeworn tradition For A Reason. Coming back from the Front created pathways to Narnia and Middle Earth for reasons, after all, and those reasons don’t really disappear just because we’re using drones to conduct our genocides now, especially since that only means we all have Front row seats via our phones.
So when Harrow gives us a grievous allegory about the power of propaganda – particularly in the hands of someone who was once the victim of horrible crimes, who then twists their desire never to be subject to the will of others again, into their right to inflict infinite & untold amounts of death, horror, & destruction on countless others, heedless of the costs – to build empires? Well, the parallels to certain people, & countries, and their insistence & military enforcement that their/our ‘rights’ enable them decimate the rights of anybody else, were too hard to ignore.
And yet, even with that in mind, even as I was seeing the poison of Queen Yvanne & her unholy reign, I still wasn’t seeing the entire, colonizing, White Woman Feminism(tm) whole of it. I certainly clocked the inherent racism in both the treatment of the Hinterlands & Owen himself, as well as the very, unsubtly pale-ness of Sir Ulna – to the point where even the flowers named after her are the purest white: I do not think that Harrow went easy on that subject at all. However, I think it’s my own privilege (as a white woman), that allowed me to overlook the fact that it was actually the combination of these two things that made Yvanne & her gift of ‘prophecy’ so powerful – Her rewriting of history had to have elements of both, or it likely wouldn’t have succeeded . She was specifically weaponizing her trauma AND targeting those she knew she could get away with inflicting trauma on, colonially, and it was the combination of the two that made Sir Ulna’s legacy so powerful & Yvanne’s reign of (forever) terror possible in the first place. I have to give huge props to other Everlasting stans out there, especially marewritess on Bookstagram, for that additional insight. “Post-mature, flirting w/post-mortem,” indeed.
Honestly, I just made a bunch of pretty pull quotes for this review, because it felt like it needed them, and also because Harrow’s prose is so beautiful that what am I gonna say about it that does it any ultimate justice?
Do you like pining? Because there’s a lot of pining, an actual heartbreaking amount, truly.
“If I die for anything let it be you?”
“Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm. Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours.”
Ma’am??? Excuse me? I perish.
I didn’t even keep in my favorite graphic, because it’s the biggest spoiler, even though I warned you about spoilers from the outset. I won’t ruin it, even so. Because you need to go and cry the way the author intended, listening to the audiobook in your living room while your family side-eyes you.
I’m honestly almost afraid to pick my next read, a little: The books (and certain fanfics) I’m reading right have been so exceptional; I don’t want to ruin the streak. I’ve read a couple of fillers, and a couple of duds here and there – when you’re reading 6-8 hrs a day, you gotta fill the time with lots of material – but nothing bad so far this year. Keep your fingers crossed, guys. I could use something a little less emotionally devastating next, though, I think. It’s a good thing this was an audiobook, or it definitely would’ve gone in the freezer .Five stars, obviously.
