Book Review: Our Infinite Fates

Title: Our Infinite Fates
Author: Laura Stevens
Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Fiction, Reincarnation

What It’s About:

500 years ago a man and a women are getting married in their teens, something that the man has been looking forward to his whole life. The woman looks a little bit uncertain, but then after they get married, she gets killed and the man also dies, the last thing that they both see is the red string connecting their wrists.

In latin america in 2002, Evelyn goes under a different name, and she wants to find Arden—the other should with whom hers gets reincarnated every 18 years. She jokes around with her parents and the nearby family who has bad blood with them, but who had come over because her sister had fallen in love with one of the boys from that family. As Evelyn heads out, one of the boys of the other family follows her out and it turns out that he is Arden in this life. He kills her and they both die.

In present day, Evelyn goes by Branwen Blythe, or Bran for short. Like in all of her previous lives, she had started to remember the last few lives she lived when she was 8. She knows that her birthday is coming up soon, and she hopes to find Arden before then so that she can beg them, in whichever form that they show up in this life, to give her time from killing her because of her sister, who is fighting off cancer. She loves her deeply, and she knows that loosing both her sister and her would devastate her mother, especially after their father had been killed. She goes to work and her coworker hands her a book of poems—ones that were written by an unknown individual in Russia who died many years ago, and they have been translated. She realizes that it is actually Arden’s work, and she reads it, something that she had never read before. The book is all about her, and she remembers the boy that Arden was in Siberia, where the poems were written and most likely left behind. She has a deep realization that since Arden always wrote a lot, there may be a lot of different notebooks everywhere across the globe all full of poems all about her.

At one point, she notices a guy who looks right at her through the store’s glass windows, and eventually she has confrontation with him, only to realize that he is not Arden, but a completely different individual; one that she had never met before. She apologizes to him, and later on she sneaks into his apartment, where she finds elements of what could be Arden, but that it’s insufficient for her to know that it is really him. She does agree to a date with the guy, but the day of the date, she shows him around the homestead, and then knocks him out cold, ties him up in the stables, when Dylan comes upon her, and she realizes that Dylan has always been Arden. Dylan had come to them a couple of years prior as a farmhand, and he had always been solid and reliable to the point that her mom likes him. She asks him to let her live for a while longer so that she can save her sister, and she offers to stay with him. Dylan and Bran take the unconscious boy to the hospital and tell the doctors that he had fallen on the homestead. So she tells her mom that she is in love with Dylan, and her mom gets really happy for them, so when Bran tells her that she wants to stay with Dylan, she does not mind. She spends the night with Dylan, chained up to his bed to not run away, while Dylan sleeps on the floor. Arden doesn’t really want to talk and tell her anything about things, but they spend time together. He even goes to her job with her, and when the boy comes in to accuse them, Bran records the whole conversation as they tell the boy the truth about who they are to each other. The boy threatens Dylan that if anything happens to her, he will go to the police. She ends up talking to her therapist, telling her that she is worried about her sister, and that there is a lot of anxiety for her, before she asks her therapist if she could ask her wife to help her with getting the bone marrow for her sister sooner. At first, the therapist tells her no, but then later calls her back and tells her that she could not get her out of her mind, and that she spoke with her wife, and her wife is willing to do a blood marrow withdrawal for her sooner, like Bran had wanted.

Evelyn’s past lives are shown throughout the book, in which we see different manners in which Arden has killed her or she has killed them, including on the Western Front during WWI, in Siberia, in Austria, in Vermont when they were both put into an asylum as girls and Evelyn had a chance to escape but then returned to kill Arden, on the seas when Evelyn was the son of a captain, and when they were both on a trawler working to bring in seafood in the southern hemisphere.

Bran makes the decision to send the video of them sharing the truth about their lives to the boy that she had been interested in and asks him to wait to share this with the police until after the appointment that she has in order to withdraw her bone marrow for her sister. Dylan and Bran go to the hospital, and she has to go through the procedure without any sort of anesthesia. As a result, Dylan stays by her side, and he holds her hand while she goes through the worst of it, resulting in them having an intimate moment. Once she is out of surgery, the Police come for him, but Dylan is gone. They instead talk to her and she tells them what had happened.

Then, her mom takes her home and she can’t believe that Dylan was someone that would harm her. Bran goes to sleep but really it’s to get her mom out, and then she sneaks out of the house, having thousands of years of experience in sneaking out. She makes a split second decision and goes to see her sister at the hospital. She and Gracie talk for a bit, watch some of Gracie’s TV shows, and then Bran heads out of the hospital, only to run into Dylan. They talk, and Dylan agrees to tell her the truth, as long as they find themselves at a nearby cliff where they can talk and eventually jump if things go sideways.

They get to this location, and Dylan tells her the truth—she is a devil. She had grown up in the UnderRealm with The Mother, and when she came of age at 18, the Mother sent her to the human world to reap a soul for her—she is only getting stronger by other people’s suffering. So she went out to the world, and came across him crying about losing his sister. She offered to spare his sister from death and disease, but he would have to come to the UnderRealm and be raked across coals for seven days and seven nights. When he asked her her name, she chooses the name Evelyn for herself, and he introduces himself as Arden. In the present day world, Dylan tells Bran that the reason that he kills her is because he figured out that if he killed her or she killed him, then they would never have to reap souls after turning 18. And so that is how they have been avoiding the requirement to reap souls as they have been made to do so per his agreement with her, and her agreement with The Mother. Bran asks if maybe they could kill The Mother the way that he has been able to kill her, and end all of the suffering once and for all, so that they could truly live and finish out their lives.

The end up making love on the cliff several times, and when the time is up, they hear helicopters searching for them, though those helicopters are too late as the both of them are pulled into the UnderRealm. While there, Evelyn finds it too high contrast—a lot of black and a lot of white, though she remembers growing up in this area, and getting on top of the trees, which both Arden and Evelyn soon figure out are bones, to their horror. She snaps off a piece of a small bone, and together they head towards the location that the Mother is at. There, they converse, and the Mother asks them if they’re ready to reap souls for her. Arden argues back that Evelyn is not hers, and the Mother tells them that she’s not his either. Arden and Evelyn realize that something is up as to why the Mother is not as powerful, and it’s because human souls and bodies can only take so much pain and suffering. Evelyn ends up attacking the Mother, and stabbing her several times, but she doesn’t die right away, and the Mother’s minions put Arden against the coals, but he’s unable to scream, and she reaps his pain. Evelyn asks her to stop and to let him go, and that they want freedom. The Mother gives them two choices: that they get reincarnated again and that they reap souls when they turn eighteen going forward, or she takes away their love for each other as it will sustain her. Evelyn doesn’t like it, knowing that they’ll never remember each other again in their lives, but she asks the Mother to let her speak to Arden. They talk, and Evelyn tells him that she will not be able to destroy the world for the mother, so the only option is to give up their love for each other. They agree to it, though they hold onto one another as the Mother takes their love for each other, and Arden reminds her that he loves her always and forever, and that they will always know each other. Suddenly the mother starts screaming that it needs to stop and that she’s in pain—the love that Arden and Evelyn have for each other is so powerful that it destroys the Mother and the UnderRealm.

In Ancient Greece, Calliope and Daphne were returning home while talking about Calliope’s plans to write a play. When they return hope, Calliope dies, and a woman shows up talking to Daphne, whom Daphne identifies as the Devil. This woman tells her that she will give her the opportunity to reincarnate with her love, and that she will keep just enough of their humanness for them to find their way back to each other; that they will always reincarnate within a short distance and time of each other. The Devil tells her that she will have to go through seven days and seven nights across the coals, but also explains that their love is what called her to them and helped her get sustenance. Daphne agrees to do this as she cannot imagine life without Calliope.

In 2054, Leon has created a fashion business, with worldwide locations; some of which he cannot even explain why he was even drawn to these locations. He’s also extremely fascinated with Gracie Blythe, the actress, though he does not know why. There’s just something there about her that calls to him and brings some warmth to him, with her general attitude and approach. He’s not able to explain what has brought him to Edinburgh, but he feels like he needs to be here, and so he’s working at the bar, mixing drinks. Suddenly, a stranger comes into the place. This man sits down at a seat, pulls out a notebook, and the book by the unknown author—ten hundred years of loving you. Leon knows that this is the person that he has been looking for, and comes over to ask him if he knows him.

My Thoughts:

I really enjoyed how the author explored the idea of reincarnation and souls that are meant to be together, staying together and finding each other throughout all of their lives. Even though the book is fictional, I feel like it had a bit of philosophical approach to reincarnation and the concept of souls. I did find myself stopping occasionally and thinking about all of these things, which in turn raised questions around my beliefs or about the universe. It’s been a while since a book has made me do something like that, but at the same time, this resulted in it being a bit slower of a read, because I had to take my time reading it, synthesizing it, exploring my own questions and feelings around the matter, before being able to come back to it and continuing reading it. That said, I did not really like the ending—which was left on a cliff hanger of “Do I know you?” I really wish that we got to see what happened to them and whether they figured out who they truly ware to one another. I would also liked to have learned what happened to Leon and this stranger that came in. Wonderful story!