Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing me with a copy of this egalley to read and give my honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.
I'm all about fantasy books that are stand alone. They are hard to find and always peak my interest. I'm always curious how the author will build the world and then wrap it up in only one book. While this book has some fantastical elements, it really teeters on the border of fantasy and magical realism.
The book is told in alternating chapters of historical events between the characters and modern day. It's a love story strewn across time.
Evelyn and Arden are fated to be together no matter when in history they meet. But they are also fated to die together over and over again by their 18th birthdays. In modern times, Evelyn finds herself fighting to stay alive to ensure her sister can be saved from the cancer she is enduring by a bone marrow transplant.
Overall, the story was nice. I liked the background the author chose to give with the chapters that take us back to other times in history. It gave a some good background as to why the characters interact with each other the way they do. However, I did find the back and forth a bit choppy and it slowed the pacing for me a bit. I also felt like we didn't spend enough time in those chapters to truly get a sense of the relationship between the two characters. I wanted to be immersed in this epic romance but I just didn't feel the chemistry between the two characters or invested in why their love story was important.
Did I connect with the characters? Not particularly. I found Evenly quite standoffish, no matter the time frame in which we met her. And Arden was just too mysterious and hard to figure out the entire book. I wanted to love them and their epic romance, but it never felt quite epic enough for me given their meetings over and over again across time.
The author did a fairly good job with the LBGTQ+ representation throughout the book. She chose to show it throughout history but what I would have liked to see is how it was truly represented at that time. Was it accepted? shunned? How did it effect the characters and how they lived their lives during all those times? It just seemed to me there should have been more of this rather than just scenes of the two characters interacting and showing their attachment to one another.
Overall, I enjoyed it enough but pushed a bit to get to the part where we find out the mystery of it all. The reveal comes quite late in the book and is not truly alluded to in any of the interactions between the characters to give the reader a sense of at least guessing what it was all about. I wish I had breadcrumbs along the way that would have kept me more interested in knowing what was actually going on. And the wrap up was just too easy for me. I wanted more from the deal that was made, more of the interaction with the evil we are introduced to, just more.