“The Everlasting” — A Myth About Love and Loss

“I have loved you since before I was born, I think. I have studied you, worshipped you, lost you, mourned you.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

Note: This reflection contains major spoilers for The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. If you haven’t read the book yet, please bookmark this post and come back to it when you’re ready.

I pre-ordered The Everlasting blindly. I’d loved The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Starling House, and I trusted Harrow’s ability to weave magic into the ordinary. I skimmed the synopsis and recognized the kind of mystical stories I love from Harrow. What I didn’t expect was how deeply this story would affect me.

The narrative unfolds across looping timelines following Owen Mallory, a quiet scholar; Sir Una the Everlasting, a fierce lady knight; and Yvanne, the queen she once loved. Owen’s mission is to return to the past again and again, recording Una’s life in a way that preserves Dominion and keeps her legend alive. But with each loop, he feels a growing familiarity with Una—something tender and ancient—until it becomes clear that they are one another’s great love across every version of the story.

And that love crept in slowly, page by page, starting with Owen’s quiet awe as he observes Una the way the entire kingdom reveres her. She is the savior who died a hero’s death for her queen and her land. But Owen’s affection is gentler, private, and steeped in a devotion he can’t explain. When Una is killed, the grief he feels is immense. And then the story bends: the queen he believed to be Yvanne is actually Chancellor Vivian from his own time—one who convinces him that keeping Una’s name alive will save Dominion.

Owen forgets much of this when he returns to his timeline, save for dreamlike flashes of another life. When he’s cast back again, he meets Una beneath the Yew tree—and this time we see the story through her eyes. She feels that same strange pull toward him. Their connection grows through subsequent timelines until their love becomes something mythic—something that transcends births, deaths, and the story itself.

The theme of love throughout the story left me breathless, Another theme, though, struck me unexpectedly: motherhood and loss, explored through both Una and Vivian/Yvanne.

Here’s your second spoiler warning. Turn back now if you haven’t read the book!

Once Owen and Una realize they’re trapped in a cycle that constantly tears them apart, they run. They steal the queen’s time-traveling book and spend nine years jumping from moment to moment, building a life between the cracks. Una becomes pregnant—three times. The first two pregnancies end because they can’t keep a child safe while they’re constantly hunted. The third time, they choose differently. They stay in one place—by the Yew tree where they first met—and create a quiet life long enough to raise their son and daughter.

Until the queen finds them.

Una dies another hero’s death, and Owen must choose: keep their children safe in a timeline where Una no longer exists, or return to the queen and rewrite the story to find Una again. The queen promises he’ll have his children back. “They come out the same, every time,” she tells him.

Owen chooses Una.

“I laid them down among the roots, where I had lain as a boy. I placed our son’s hand around his sister’s. They curled toward one another, fetal in their fear, forming the uneven shape of a heart—mine, I thought, and yours.”

Owen returns to his time… and then back to Una, who remembers him instantly.

And then comes the reveal that pulls it all together in a super shocking way: Vivian—Queen Yvanne—is Una’s mother.

This is where the story shifts emotionally.

Una’s motherhood is shaped by sacrifice. She gives up her identity as a knight to protect her children. She fears not for her own death, but for the trauma her children might suffer by seeing her fall. Her love orients her always toward protecting others, even when it costs her everything she is.

Vivian’s motherhood is shaped by loss. She was forced to abort Una before birth by a king who wanted to punish her. She buried the fetus beneath a Yew seed—planting the very tree that resurrected Una. Una grew up loved by a woodcutter and his husband. But Vivian, stripped of the right to be her mother, poured all her grief and longing into building Una into a legend. Not her daughter, but her savior—her immortal. Vivian’s manipulation is fueled by grief. Her villainy is rooted in love twisted by loss. And even through her cruelty, that pain is unmistakable.

This duality—Una’s nurturing love and Vivian’s consuming love—hit me hard. Because I’ve lived the aftermath of stillbirth. And grief doesn’t always look like sorrow. Sometimes it looks like silence, guilt, obsession, denial, or the inability to let go of the moment life split into before and after.

That might be why I’m drawn to writing emotionally complicated women—especially those who’ve been misunderstood or mislabeled as villains. I did this with Jordy in The Jilted Lovers Club. In Savior Complex, where Jordy was first introduced, she’s selfish, careless, and unsympathetic—even after she and Brayden lose their baby to stillbirth. But in Jilted Lovers, we learn the truth: she was deeply affected. She felt guilt because she hadn’t wanted to be a mother. She felt ashamed for experiencing relief in her grief. We also see how her own strained relationship with her mother shaped her fears about motherhood. And we get to witness her healing as she confides in Ashton and grows to love his daughter, Lottie, eventually becoming her stepmother. Ashton never made Jordy’s feelings wrong, and that gave her room to heal.

Now, in the book I’m writing—The Lost Lovers Club—I’m exploring another facet of motherhood and loss. Sasha, Lottie’s biological mother, returns after abandoning her years before. Lottie is four and sees Jordy as her true mom. Sasha must face the pain of what she missed, the guilt of leaving, and the heartbreak of watching another woman fill the role she once held. It’s raw and messy and completely complicated. It’s also very human.

Writing these stories has been its own healing for me. It’s shown up in my Sunset Bay series, in Lahoma Springs, and even in my Hope series. And now, reading The Everlasting while writing another story about maternal loss makes the experience feel even more layered.

The Everlasting isn’t just a beautiful, mythic love story. It’s a story that understands the complexity of motherhood—the grief, the sacrifice, the longing, and the shape loss leaves behind. And reading it has deepened my understanding of the characters I’m crafting now, and the parts of myself still learning how to heal.

Did you read The Everlasting? What struck you the most about this book? What other books have hit you at an emotional level?