Thank you St. Martin's Press for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

Our Infinite Fates is the fantastical story of two souls bound together by love and betrayal across 100 lifetimes. Evelyn and Arden are stuck in a tragic cycle. They fall deeply in love only to kill each other before reaching their eighteenth birthdays over and over for centuries. The story is told from multiple timelines and multiple POVs, allowing the reader to experience not only the current iteration of their life, but those going all the way back to their origin. Evelyn is determined this time will be last. She must end the chaos not only to save herself, but to save the life of the sister she loves. This beautiful YA novel is nothing short of an emotional rollercoaster.. Be prepared to have all the feelings, sometimes simultaneously. I enjoyed the premise and the book's engaging and fresh perspective on reincarnation, destiny and a death-defying connection. I especially loved the star-crossed lovers trope and the unique storytelling approach. Many times, flashbacks can be frustrating, but I found much of the character development in those moments. The current-day lovers sometimes felt a little flat, so giving the details of their rich history helped round out the corners. While the heartbreak stakes in this one are high, honestly, so is the pay off. If you love a tragedy, if you love a story of infinite love and sacrifice, if you love a side serving of medical themed tearjerker, pick this one up. You're going to love Our Infinite Fates.

Thank you @wednesdaybooks & @macmillan.audio for the finished copy & ALC ♡

3.5⭐️

°✩₊˚.✧˚.₊*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Star-crossed soulmates live and die at each others hands for all eternity ˚｡𖦹 ⋆｡°✩₊˚.

“𝙸𝚏 𝚊 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚘 𝚒𝚜 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚠𝚑𝚘 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚐𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚞𝚙 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚕𝚍, 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝚊 𝚟𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚊𝚒𝚗 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚛𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚎. 𝚂𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚠𝚑𝚘 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚐𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚞𝚙 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚕𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎.”

♾️ I loved the changing settings as we travel with Evelyn and Arden through their many lifetimes. How fun to globe trot through time and space from present day Wales to ancient China, from El Salvador to Algeria to France to Norway, even the Ottoman Empire. Gender fluidity worked really well throughout the book.

°✩₊˚.🎧⋆☾⁺₊ The audiobook was easy listening: Sofia Oxenham has a very soothing voice and loved her accent!

While it was fast paced and easy to read, there was something missing for me. That does not mean that I don’t think this will be wildly popular. There is beautiful prose. Some of the poetry sprinkled throughout the book moved me deeply - and I love the concept of a book within the book.

This was more vibes at the expense of plot, which resulted in quite the buildup. I wanted the main characters to insist on being told “why” much sooner. I do think this is a book I would have loved when I was a young adult [btw, there is one closed door scene toward the end]. And of course, the book itself is beautiful with golden edges and foil on the cover.

“𝙴𝚟𝚎𝚗 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝚠𝚎 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚋𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚜 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚝𝚑 𝚖𝚢 𝚎𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚊𝚕 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚝 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚕𝚕, 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚗 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝚊 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛 𝚍𝚘𝚎𝚜 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚑 𝚒𝚝𝚜 𝚕𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 𝚋𝚞𝚛𝚗𝚜 𝚘𝚗 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚗𝚒𝚊.”

I absolutely LOVED this! It was a twisting tale of fate, soulmates and an endless cycle of killing the one you love. The story was beautiful, the writing was exquisite and the love between Evelyn and Arden was so exquisite that it was magical. Everyone can only dream of finding love that is like the one that is found in this book. If you're looking for something to cure your book hangover after The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue this book is for you.

basically “I’ll find you in every lifetime” as a threat AND a promise.
a really, really lovely story full of heart-wrenching pining and unyielding love. i loved the chapters of all their past lives and loved even more that in each lifetime their love (and souls) transcended gender - that was a really cool touch.
(also it’s giving “francesca” by hozier)

I'm a bit late but this is the most beautiful book I ever read!! Two main characters find each other in different lifetimes and reasonably wanted to kill but also wanted to be close to each other! Since this is YA, I find this remarkable that Steven wrote this by her heart. Thank you so much Netgalley for this opportunity! I've already purchased the physical copy and it's special edition from Faecrate! Five stars!!

📖 ARC REVIEW 📖

Thank you @stmartinspress for an early copy of Our Infinite Fates by Laura Steven. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. 🤍

Rating: ⭐⭐/5
Release date: February 27th, 2025

Blurb: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210395729-our-infinite-fates?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=aQT28Vz02B&rank=1

🛑Read on with caution; review may contain spoilers🛑

Our Infinite Fates, which is mostly compared with The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, is a love story that spans several hundred years of Evelyn and Arden. Their love suffers from a curse that neither can live past eighteen years old per reincarnation, and one must die in the hand of the other.

I had high hopes for this book given the blurb, and a love that transcends time? The love must be strong between the main characters. I was proven wrong. Some chapters of this book include Evelyn and Arden’s encounters throughout their several lives, but none of them felt like love for me. Most of those chapters gave me more anxiety than sweet, sweet love; because it was told through Evelyn’s POV, and for most of their lives, it was Arden who hunts her down and kills her before both of them turn eighteen; and Evelyn I feel like had so much love to give as she expressed through her various lives to the families she lived with. She loves and she loves and I felt her urge to just be able to live freely without the thought of Arden having to kill her sooner without having lived her life yet.

I think the reason why I didn’t really connect with the main characters and why their love felt so flat for me was there was really no context on how they fell in love in the first place. Their relationship was more so just implied. The curse also felt lackluster for me and I felt it was explained near the end of the book so there wasn’t really much context to that either.

Our Infinite Fate is beautifully written, mind you, but it lacked the oopmmhh for me and that strong emotional pull between the characters. This book also made me realize that maybe these types of plots aren’t for me since I didn’t love The Invisible Life of Addie Larue as well.

Wow wow wow. Absolutely obsessed with this book from start to finish! This story is unlike any I've read before. I think I only made it 5% of the way through before it made me cry for the first time (and trust me - there were many times after.) Such a good read/listen! 5 stars! (Maybe even 6!!)

Arc read: When I tell you, this book was AMAZING!!! The writing, the story, the flashbacks, everything was chef's kiss! I'd only change a few things about the ending but regardless it's still a 5 star read for me. So so good! I couldn't put it down!

Rating: 4/5
I received the eARC for my honest opinion.

I won’t lie, I really struggled reading this one, I even switched over to the audio full time about 30% in to see if I would like it more and I really couldn’t get into this book. I know a lot of people will be able to but it’s not my kind of fantasy book. However, with that said I was invested to see how the book ended, and I don’t know if I was into it until about 80%. It’s a beautiful story, but with all the time jumping I found myself lost at times and overly repetitive for me.

I wanted to get into the book, I found the plot to be interesting, but I felt that it fell a little flat for me. You will be introduced to Evelyn and Arden, they have been trying to kill each other for thousands of years, but they both don’t know how or why it even started and just be ready you won’t know the whole truth until about the ending of the book. For me the ending of the book is where it finally picked up and had a lot of action going on. I found it hard to connect to the characters in this book because of all the back and forth and not being able to really understand the characters from the start.

This book wasn’t for me, and I would have rated it 3.5 stars but because of the ending that made me wrap it up to 4. I did find that the narrator of the book, Sofia Oxenham did a wonderful job with the book.

I want to thank NetGalley, SMP and Macmillan for the opportunity to review this book.

4 ⭐️ - Infinite Fates takes you through a variety of mini-worlds where Arden and Evelyn’s paths crossed, and with each chapter we get closer to uncovering why they’re stuck in the same cycle. Exploring each new world was so much fun and you got a front row view to how much their love transcended their circumstances in each life. From enemies to best friends to strangers, the pull between them was magnetic and tender.

“I love you, I have loved you, and I will love you.”

I wish there was a book two simply to revisit their love again and again! While we uncovered more about their story, there were several plot twists I didn’t see coming! I HIGHLY recommend everyone pick up this book - it will leave you grasping for more between Arden and Evelyn!

Special thank you to St. Martins Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to dive into this ARC! ✨

Across hundreds of lifetimes, two souls are intertwined—fated to fall in love, and fated to die together before their lives have ever really begun.

Different time periods, geographies, and physical forms. In each, Evelyn and Arden find one another. They inevitably remember their past lives and that—by their 18th birthday—one has always killed the other, which also results in their own death. But why are they stuck in this cycle? And why can't they survive past that threshold, that milestone marking passage into adulthood? While Evelyn remembers in bits and pieces, Arden's memory remains intact. He refuses to disclose the origins of their never-ending duel. asking that she trust he does it for her own good.

Each reincarnation of Evelyn and Arden is unique, but there are certain elements of themselves they retain regardless of the body they inhabit or the situation they are born into. The author makes every version of Evelyn and Arden feel like a new individual with their same souls intact. There's a familiarity, an essence. Being able to create characters with that many layers is a feat. The writing itself is beautiful and approachable.

One of my biggest criticisms is the pacing—it was so slow that there were points I almost considered not picking it back up. There wasn't enough hinting at the "why" behind it all. You do finally get there, but it takes forever and hits you all at once. The real letdown was reading nearly the entire book to get to the big plot twist, only for it to make very little sense. It felt misaligned with the entire story up until that point, and the remainder of the book felt rushed trying to tie these disparate storylines together.

Were you specifically looking for a book recommendation in the vein of, “I want to read something that will make me cry my eyes out?”

Let me introduce you to Our Infinite Fates. I need some eye drops, I think.

First, I’m going to tell you one thing: Ignore the whole blurb, because it’s trash and then don’t get mad at Laura Steven, because she’s not the one who was in charge of that disaster. All you need to know about this book is that the two main characters have lived innumerable lives and one of them (they’ve both done it) has killed the other in each life right before they turn eighteen. Honestly, that’s all you need to know and that’s the best way to go into this. The rest is all a fantastical, emotional, philosophical, beautiful journey that hops through history and closely examines the nature of love, relationships, empathy, and sacrifice.

This was lovely and painful and I couldn’t put it down. 5⭐️

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher through the SMP Early Readers Program via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Star Review/Fantasy/Romantasy/LGBTQ Fantasy/Standalone Novel/Supernatural Fantasy/YA Fantasy/YA Romantasy/YA Fiction

This story is as convoluted and silly as it sounds and I loved that. I really enjoyed the author’s ability to weave the stories of the past lives together into the present day life of Evelyn and Arden. The final twist and reveal was way more than I ever thought it could be. It added a lot to the mystery behind why Arden would never tell her why he had to continually kill her and made their love story through the ages even more tragic.

Four and a half stars rounded up

I loved this tale of love and reincarnation! Two people so inexplicitly drawn to each other even knowing they are doomed to hurt each other.

I was a fascinating read traveling through so many lifetimes. I loved that the author decided to have our main characters be together despite gender or ethnic background, showing the universality of love.

When the source of this curse/reincarnation is revealed I was definitely surprised. I loved never quite knowing where this book was leading.

This whole story enthralled me and I need all my friends to read it.

: Beautifully written fantasy love story that follows a couple through the ages. The book jumps back and forth between present day and previous lives the two main characters have lived and died together. The present day is the focus of the story with Evelyn wanting to live past her 18th birthday to help save her sister, and trying to understand why she must die before her 18th birthday. Not only is the way love is shown endearing, I appreciated that the characters weren’t always the same sex as the initial lifetime. In each life their relationship always had love for each other, and varying degrees of hate or sadness. With them living so many lives, it was interesting to see how that shaped their current views of humanity.

Thank you so much to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for an ARC in return for an honest review!

-

4 stars - Hey Google, play exile by Taylor Swift ft. Bon Iver

This was one of my top anticipated reads this year, and I am a bit sad to say it didn’t quite hit. Maybe it was bad timing when I picked the book up, maybe I had too high expectations, or maybe it just wasn’t meant to be despite it initially seemingly hitting all the right boxes. It wasn’t bad, it just also wasn’t life altering. It was just good.

“The sensation that our love was a palimpsest, written over and over again so that I could no longer read the original.”

The concept of the story is heartbreaking, romantic and honestly I’m a little obsessed with it. I love reading stories that take us through history and across the world, seeing the characters interact with it all as they change and grow and learn.

"How many times over the centuries had I wished our love for each other was as simple as this? As simple as a mother’s soft approval, as firelight on our faces as we kissed by a hearth, as a thousand tiny pleasures and kindnesses adding up to an entirely ordinary love story? But our love story was not like that. It was blood and pain and death, an awful cycle doomed always to repeat."

I wish the book had spent more time showing us the actual love story/stories unfolding, rather than mostly just telling us over and over how deep and complicated their bond is. We get glimpses here and there of both love and hate, but for the most part it didn’t feel like we got to see the actual meat and bones of it all, and that unfortunately just wasn’t enough to make me fully invested in the characters.
That also goes for their personalities and interests; we’re mostly just told what they’re like, rather than getting to see it in action. Arden’s love of flora and fauna comes to mind, with the only real showing of it being the sugar water he keeps in his pocket for tired bees (this example is however repeated multiple times).

“The joy and pain we shared had knotted the very fabric of us together.”

The only character I felt like we got shown the proper why and how for was Gracie, Evelyn’s sick sister. We get to see both Evelyn and Arden show her plenty of true platonic sibling love, and we get to see why they love her so much - she’s funny, quirky and full of life. Her personality and interests are front and centre both when she’s on and off page. If anything, I’d say Gracie is the real main character of this story and that it is more so a story of family bonds (both born and found), loyalty and love than anything else.

“Love can make a villain of anyone.”

Although I struggled to connect with the main characters and their dynamic in the present, I really enjoyed the snippets we got to see of their past. The chapters set in the past were the real star of the show (other than Gracie), and I wish we had gotten to see way more in depth of it. I also wish the writing had been even more flowery, as I am a sucker for beautiful prose and we did get to see pieces of it here and there (as my 30 highlighted quotes can attest to).

“I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.”

The climax fell flat for me, but I enjoyed how the eventual end of the story went. So all in all this was a good book for me, but not great like I had hoped.

“After all this time, your fate has not bled you dry of it? You still have not learned that love cannot conquer all?”

This was poetic, whimsical, magical, and time-bending.

“I will always be yours. But I gave up the right to call you mine a long time ago.”

What would you do if the love of your life killed you before your 18th birthday? What would you do if you reincarnated and history repeated? Your love finds you before your 18th birthday and kills you again? Over and over for a thousand years. Losing mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, losing everything except your love over the millennia. Arden knowing nothing but Evelyn for a thousand years. Evelyn having no memory of why Arden was doing this.

“You have faith in all of humanity. You have faith in love. Please, have faith in me. I do this to protect you. Do you understand that? That I would lay my body over yours, war after war after war, life after life after life?”

I loved the concept of soul love in this. Loved love, yeah, I’m using that word too much. Anyway. Soul love for Arden and Evelyn was that no matter what body they wore in each life, man/woman, their souls loved each other. Evelyn didn’t identify with one gender over the other, whatever body Evelyn was in was acceptable. Arden did prefer a male body but also didn’t have to many objections when they were female. Love existed beyond the physical.

“If a hero is someone who will give up love to save the world, then a villain is the reverse. Someone who will give up the world to save love.”
“So you’re a villain. You admit it.”
He shrugged. “There’s no line I wouldn’t cross to keep a loved one safe.”

Our Infinite Fates was a test.

A test of time.

Of fate.

Of love.

Of death.

Of my patience.

It was a great concept, I actually LOVE this concept, the killing over lifetimes, over and over finding each other, but the flashbacks got old fast. I know they were mostly important to the story but I got bored.

“I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.”

I was enjoying it, aside from the too many flashbacks, until the end, like 85% in, where I just... what happened?? Like, a pyramid scheme? Really? And the very end? I don’t really like open-ended endings.

But you know, overall, really enjoyable!

Thank you so much to Wednesday Books and the author for an eARC and a gorgeous PR box!

The premise of the story appealed to me so much. Two lovers who reincarnate and are eternally drawn to each other, but are fated to kill each other in every lifetime.

I wanted this story to break my heart. I really wanted to read this book through tears and uncontrollable sobs. But I really just didn’t relate to the characters and their love story as much as I was hoping I would. It felt a bit flat to me at times.

However, I really loved how poetry was weaved throughout the story - it really did have some beautiful lines. Although I didn’t necessarily like every aspect of this story, I still plan to recommend it to people who I think would appreciate it more than I would.

Thank you to NetGalley/St Martins Press for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Our Infinite Fates completely captivated me from the very first page—something that almost never happens to me. It had that same haunting, lyrical quality that made The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue one of my all-time favorite books, and I was absolutely hooked. The writing was stunning, the atmosphere immersive, and the story itself felt both intimate and epic, weaving fate, love, and the passage of time in a way that was utterly mesmerizing. I couldn’t put it down, and even after finishing, I find myself thinking about it constantly. A must-read!

Wow I loved this! A super interesting premise of fated lovers, reincarnated life after life, with dual timelines that felt so rich in transporting us through history. The twist at the end really got me and I was on the edge of my seat! I wish the love part of the love story was shown to us a bit more, so I could fall in love with them too. We were told of their love but not often shown the why of them being in love. I still believed it though and devoured this book! This story will stay with me for a while. 4.5 stars rounded up