Thank you for letting me read and review this book on Netgalley.

This book was nothing like I thought it would be but in a way that exceeded my expectations. I haven't read anything like this before.

You know those books that you read and then they stay with you? The ones you find yourself thinking about days and even weeks after you finish reading. Our Infinite Fates is one of those books.
I’m not sure how she managed it, but I genuinely think Laura Steven has come up with something new here. I’ve never read a book like it. It’s beautiful and desperate and emotional and heartbreaking but at the same time there’s this thread of belonging and being known and loved that runs the whole way through.
It’s masterfully done. The stories are woven together in a way that you can see the characters coming through even when they’re in different lives, in different places. It’s so atmospheric - she manages to really root the stories in their respective locations, and the characters feel so real. I felt like I was almost watching through a window - seeing just a snippet of their lives - which I think is exactly how this book is supposed to feel.
It really is an incredible story and I wholeheartedly recommend it. I devoured it.

“Maybe that’s all love is, in the end. An endless tempting of fate”

I have no words for how gorgeous this story is! Following the main character through this was both breathtaking and stressful. I will say the middle part is a bit dragged out but as a story in whole it works perfectly.

These characters go through years finding and losing each other. The chapters giving history to them was such an interesting way of explaining more and more of the story without making it fill overwhelming. The end made me put it down and rethink my view of the book!!

What an interesting read!
I am usually lost when there are more than two timelines but on this occasion, all the different timelines give a very enjoyable rhythm to the book.
The story was very intriguing and catchy, the characters are just so lovable, and the twists were brilliant!
Would definitely recommend if you like romantasy!

Our Infinite Fates is a gut wrenching romance that send both the reader and the protagonists on a journey of discovery. Evelyn is cursed to be killed before her 18th birthday throughout time as she is reincarnated through the decades. Her killer hides behind various faces and genders, but Evelyn is inexplicably drawn to them again and again. Her killer has full knowledge of why the pair are caught in this fatal loop, but fate cleans her memories each time.

If Evelyn can work out why the cycle began maybe she can free herself and finally live the life that she longs for. Filled with longing, hope and suspense this romantic thriller will grasp your attention and remain with you for a good while after.

This book was incredible. I loved how it jumped between their current life and their pasts, showing more and more layers each time. The fact that they keep finding each other in all these different lifetimes, different countries, with different names and different genders (yes, it is queer), and still manage to fall for each other even if it has a tragic ending each time.

The present timeline is brilliant. Evelyn is so determined to help her sister, even being willing to go through the pain of donating bone marrow without any anaesthesia so she can save her. She’s lost so many families in her past by dying young, and she refuses to let her sister die too.

The past timelines were also really well written. I loved how they were mixed in with the present chapters and I felt like it helped you learn more about them. A lot of them were heartbreaking to read, and I found myself crying quite a few times. My favourite was when you find out what actually caused the curse, I felt it helped tie everything together. I also liked seeing how the curse worked, and how eventually they could break it.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book! It is beautiful and heartbreaking and perfect.

This book serves as a heartfelt tribute to the incredible Taylor Swift song "exile." It weaves a narrative that tugs at your emotions and ultimately mends them.

I found myself racing through the pages, unable to absorb the words quickly enough. Despite knowing what lay ahead, my heart and soul became deeply enmeshed in this extraordinary work, captivated by its brilliance.

An incredible debut that deserves to be read and shared and loved in every lifetime.

A testimony to love, in its many forms, and the power it has to shape our behaviour. Definitely one best to go into not knowing the precise details of the scenario, though I feel had we known the key details earlier it may have made it easier to connect to the characters.
Our main characters are Evelyn and Arden, two souls who are reincarnated each lifetime and who always find each other only for Arden to kill Evelyn as soon as they turn eighteen. Evelyn never recalls the details of their past lives, but there is always a hint of something that is picked up on right before the crucial moments.
The book starts with showing us some of the past incarnations. We don’t know exactly what’s happening until we catch up to Evelyn in the present where she lives in Abergavenny with her mother and a younger sister. This is a life she likes, though it is not without its hardship. As she approaches the time she knows marks her end, she is determined to find a way to challenge her fate.
As we journey through the book it’s not hard to see the power love holds. At times I felt rather cynical but as we learn more of the reason behind this strange predicament I found myself hoping that they would find a way to succeed where previously they had failed.
Thanks to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review this prior to publication.

Amazingly written YA novel.

I loved the chapters in between the Present day timeline, taking you back to the past, as even though they are just a couple of pages, they are very well written and immerse you in historical worldbuilding.

This was a sensational read and I will be recommending at my bookshop.
I found the characters to be very well fleshed out and lovable. The last couple of chapters really blew me away

Oh this was everything I hoped it would be and more. A story of love and loss that is so beautifully written.

It’s a book to take your time with and get lost in, I wish I could read it for the first time all over again.

Our Infinite Fates is a unique book about reincarnation, love, death and trying to break the seemingly endless cycle of fate. It is thrilling and emotional at the same time, just expect to feel everything when you read it.

I have to admit, I have always been a big fan of soulmate stories. They are hard to write well because it can often read as insta-love, but this kind of tale, where two people are endlessly drawn together and pulled apart, is so moving.

I’ve seen the book compared to The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue and I think that if you liked the element of travel, the poetic prose and the sense of danger lingering in the background of that book you will love this one. I can’t write too much without giving away all of the secrets of the plot, but I can say that this read like a love story, tragedy and adventure all rolled into one. As these are some of my favourite genres, that’s high praise.

I would recommend this book if you loved Addie La Rue, Meet Me in Another Life, and if you read a lot of reincarnation fanfiction (a compliment because I used to stay up until 3am reading those stories!).

An ode to love in all its forms, OUR INFINITE FATES is an emotionally deep, engaging and heart-wrenching tale of doomed lovers, entwined by fate, but destined to kill each other in each reincarnation. One of them, Arden, knows why. Evelyn does not, and they are hunted throughout their lifetimes before their eighteenth birthday, to avoid a fate which was sealed a thousand years ago.

Thank you to PRH and NetGalley for a chance to read this early! All thoughts are my own.

OIF is a devastating but uplifting tale, vastly emotionally intelligent and complex, it is marked as YA but don’t be fooled. This is a narrative loaded with impactful musings on love, death, fate, the human soul. It is all at once a tale written through the eyes of Evelyn - our deeply empathetic, compassionate narrator - as she battles to understand why her beloved keeps killing her before she has a chance to live, but also a compelling musing on the nature of love. It is clear that Laura Steven intended to write a book that itself is an ode to the rich tapestry of love in all its forms, textures and colours, and OIF is one of the most deeply compassionate novels I’ve read in a long time. This is more than a tale of lovers, it is an exploration of grief, and the strength it takes to remain open, loving and hopeful in a world where there is so much loss and pain.

Evelyn and Arden are a unique pairing, reincarnated into differing genders throughout their 1000 years. Steven writes a novel where our lovers are not constrained by genders, by ethnicities, worldviews or timelines, we meet them in Northern Song in the 1040, on the Western Front in France, in an asylum in Vermont, in Nauru, in Argentina - fragments of their 100 different lives are presented in shards of a story that continually speaks back to itself. We are offered glimpses of their tapestry, woven with the multicoloured threads of their past lives, in order to understand the overriding present day narrative in Wales, where their current reincarnations strive to navigate yet another cycle of their cursed dynamic.

Their relationship is an ode to deep love, that pragma understood by ancient Greeks - enduring love built up over many years. I adored that we met Evelyn and Arden in differing forms, saw the emotional consequences of loving and losing each other over 1000 years. Theirs is a love I’ll return to, when I need to be reminded of the innate power of love as a human concept. It is, as Evelyn says, the only thing worth believing in.

However, what’s not lost is the refreshing teenage narration - these are young adults burdened with a wealth of lived experiences that makes them deeply complex, rich in pain and life, but they’re also adolescents falling in love over and over again. The narrative carefully balances that sharp-edge of first love, only with the unique dynamic that this is not first love at all, it’s the 100th time these characters have felt the bite of yearning, desire and infatuation.

OIF is undoubtedly character led, and although there is a twist about 80% through - which delighted me!! - that leads our characters to a fantastical high stakes environment where their love will be cataclysmically tested, for much of this story we are simply following Evelyn and Arden as they navigate each other in this newest life. The narrative oscillates between present and past, broken up into a steadily chugging speed thanks to the interspersed of non-linear fragments of past lives. These glimpses are not detractions, however, Steven cleverly uses these snippets of backstory to deepen the connection to our present day Evelyn and Arden, offering the context needed to understand more keenly the whys and how’s of their current selves. Without these breaks in our present day narrative this novel would not have the emotional depth needed to work - we would simply not care for our lovers in the same way.

That said, I do feel that the present day narrative was a touch passive, with chunks of time passing as though our lovers were moving a long a stream. Present day Evelyn, known as Branwen, is pragmatic about wanting to stay alive so she can offer life-saving stem cells to her sister, and the ticking clock element of her looming eighteenth birthday and the inevitable arrival of Arden does keep the stakes high. However I would have liked a touch more urgency in this ticking clock - it felt a little like Arden staved off the decision to kill Evelyn simply because this was the intended plot for this lifetime - it was very, very clear that Arden is conflicted throughout, and has built high, thick emotional walls to protect Evelyn from themself, sequestering their love from Evelyn out of a sense of deep conflict, shame, fear, regret. This is a minor sense, though, as I found this ticking clock element did pick up in tension as we progressed - perhaps just a little more interaction between our present day Arden upon arrival in Wales was needed to truly get the weight of their struggle.

However, overall this is an impactful and deeply moving read, filled with all the utterly human emotions that overflow in Greek tragedies. I loved it !!

This review is for Our Infinite Fates by Laura Steven which will be released in the UK on the 27th February! Thanks so much to Netgalley and Penguin Random House UK for giving me an eArc copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Now this was such a hyped up book, from seeing it all over booktok and bookstagram and then seeing it advertised everywhere… but it fell a little flat for me. And I really hate saying that!! It was advertised as a mixture of Addie Larue and This is How You Lose the Time War, and to be fair it was a fairly good representation. It was just a little off the mark, and was a little slow going for my tastes.

As mentioned, the pacing of the book was extremely slow for me. You don’t really get to understand the main plot line of the story till about 60-70% of the way in, and then the big plot twist hits. The first part of the book is just a massive build up to this plot twist, where you get to understand the backstory. But it just felt so much longer than it needed to be, and you’re just left thinking ‘can it please just get to the point already???’. The ending however was a twist I wasn’t expecting, especially the last few pages of the book explaining how it all began.

I did love the characters though, especially our main character Evelyn and her sister Gracie. It was such a sweet dynamic to the see the love shared between siblings and the things they will do for each other. I also loved the flashbacks you see of the main characters and the love they share with their different families throughout their incarnations over the years. And that they can remember as many as they can, and love them all the same even when they’re born again, so sweet! It just didn’t really go into enough detail with the relationship between Evelyn and Arden, but I do understand there would have been waaay too many throwbacks to have a lot of detail with, otherwise the book would be a bazillion pages long. I also did love how gender was never really an issue here, with both of the main characters experiencing a different genders throughout their reincarnations.

Overall, it was a great book and I would recommend, however I’m not sure I would pick it up again. It was just a little too slow for me, but completely understand it will be different for everyone!

This was an exceptionally well-written book, with a unique reincarnation plot that had me inwardly gasping.

Destined to find each other and to never survive past eighteen years old, these two souls repeat their twisted pattern over millennia with the same tragic ending. Over and over, with no hope of a life together no matter how much they may wish for it.

The gender-fluidity of their souls was an interesting concept, although it seemed to tend to one pairing more than the other over each life, and the theological comparisons made by the main characters in an attempt to explain ignited a fair bit of curiosity.

Overall, this was both heartbreaking and intriguing, a story that you just cannot put down once started, with an entirely unexpected twist.

I really enjoyed this book, it was heart warming but also sad. I liked the little snippets into the past lives although I would have loved these to be a little longer so we could really get to see how the characters fell in love over and over and delve into their different personalities but I would 100% recommend this book to romance lovers

Our Infinite Fates is a breathtaking novel with the most gorgeous love story sprawled over thousands of years. The love between Evelyn and Arden was addictive to read and shattering each time their lives came to an abrupt end.

I really enjoyed the way the story flitted between the present in Wales and the past in various locations and times, truly showing the depth of their love. I loved that their love for one another had no boundaries and that in every life they found one another, regardless of the tragic reasons for their pull towards the other.

Laura Steven’s writing in this novel is utterly beautiful. The myriad of descriptions, the way the story ebbs and flows and the last chapter had my heart singing. Words cannot summarise how stunning this novel is, if you haven’t read it yet, pick it up and see for yourselves.

Thank you to Penguin Random House UK, Laura Steven and NetGalley for my early review copy in exchange of a fair and honest review.

There are so many fantasy books out there these days that follow similar magic systems and plots. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it… but it does mean that when you find a fantasy book with a wholly unique plot it makes it feel that much more special.

Our Infinite Fates is that. Unique, special, profound. A conversation on morals, a mystery to be unravelled and a whole lot of yearning. A story told in a format that means you’re given snippets of infinite histories whilst you learn the characters in present day.

Our Infinite Fates truly is a masterful piece of romantic storytelling, cleverly formed and intricately woven. Definitely a favourite for me.

Our Infinite Fates is hauntingly beautiful, it's a gorgeous story that will stay with me for a long time.

The writing was poetic without feeling too overwhelming, the story is split between modern day and snippets of Evelyn & Arden's love story across the years. I liked the way it was laid out and the different places and times that were visited, it was a great way of building their relationship and feeling the angst of them being torn apart repeatedly.

Any book I read in a day or has me crying is a five star read for me, and this book had me doing both. The story felt so gripping and I couldn't put it down! The last couple of chapters were wonderful, I didn't see the explanation coming and the final chapter was so sweet.

It's reminiscent of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Divine Rivals, it has similar themes but felt unique at the same time. If you like those sorts of books then I think this is definitely one to read!

I think this is a book that many many people will absolutely adore! The way it talks about love and what it means to love is so beautiful and this kind of love is something that a lot of people should be reminded of. I also loved the settings and different time periods that the protagonists lived in, each of their lives could get their own book, haha.

The book had a mystery element that makes you keep on reading and the ending was luckily quite surprising! :D

This a book is about love and yearning and passion and history and poetry and really a book for everyone! <3

Beautifully tragic

As vision once said to wanda, what is grief but love persevering

We follow evelyn and arden through their infinite lives in which they have loved and killed each other in everyone.

I feel like I didn’t really get into the story until we were in present day wales and then all the past lives were a fascinating look into history and love and loss across time and history. I really like how their souls were randomly allocated bodies, different genders and races and abilities.

At the core of this book is what does it mean to love and be human. But a sub theme I guess I found interesting is that evelyn does not remember as much as Arden, and how without the memories and knowledge how that impacts their dynamic, relationships and world view. How assumptions can form your belief system which could be based entirely on correct or wrong assumptions. The idea is so human to believe so certainly in our point of view but what if that is wrong?

Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review