What can I even say about this perfect, intimate, beautifully written story of a life-saving love across lifetimes and timelines? I don't know if I could ever do it justice. It's like Alix Harrow found a secret string in my soul, pulled it out, and wrote this story with it.

This is about a love that crosses every barrier, filled with a longing I know all too deeply, set against a backdrop of impossible circumstances. It's about finding one's courage and agency when evil and the world has always taken those away. And it's about the healing that comes from being seen, and known, and loved, nevertheless.

Yes, I have had a love like this, and this book reminds me of it. It hurt to read, but it was also healing, because how can Alix write such words without knowing this love herself?

No words exist for when half your soul dies and is ripped from you, but the grief in this book broke me because of how close it came to describing my experience.

As we who grieve know, time with a beloved would never have been enough. And yet. And yet. Would we have traded that short time for having never known them at all? Most would say no, and I am one of their number.

Sometimes on person who loves us, remembers us, is enough.

The Everlasting confirmed for me why I continue to write: that while I wait beneath the proverbial yew tree, I remember him. And that is enough.