The weeks around the holidays are my favorite time of year for bookselling. Everyone is looking for recommendations—for friends and loved ones, for an office-mate, for the yankee swap, for the family member they don’t know that well other than they like to read…and sometimes even for themselves. It’s a book lover’s playground, and it’s the time of year I get to do the thing I love most: hand-sell books! Ask any bookseller, and they’ll all admit the same thing. We love December because people genuinely want our help and guidance, and it feels so good to get the right book into someone’s hands.
In preparation for the season, I always look back over my reading notes from throughout the year so I can be ready with those ideas for anyone on your list. While this was a wonky reading year for me, with many books put down mid-way through, there was one I still think about often that hasn’t gotten much praise and I’m now recommending almost daily: The Everlasting, by Alix Harrow.
Let me preface this by admitting that I’m a big Alix Harrow fan. I’ve read every one of her novels, and many of her short stories. She has grown as a writer over the years, and her latest is her very best one yet. It’s also a novel that will appeal to a larger audience than her previous books, since many of her novels have been soaked in a level of magic or fantasy that might not be everyone’s cup of tea.
On its surface, The Everlasting is a story about the legend of a knight that grows to form the national ethos of a country, and the scholar who fell in love with that legend as a child. Anyone interested in reading about legends or fairy tales will thoroughly enjoy this book. It has all of the normal makings of those kinds of stories, and characters you will both love and despise along the way. But once you get into it, it becomes clear that this book is about more than knights and scholars. Harrow is really looking at the deeper themes of history and memory: who writes the stories that we are taught from, and who gets to decide the arc of the stories that greatly influence our views of ourselves and the world at large.
Using time travel, Harrow shows us a scholar who is repeatedly sent through time to make sure that the story happens just the way it’s supposed to, as dictated by those in power. Of course, the more he gets sent back, the more he learns, and the more he fights to change how the story is told. This book is much more than a fun fantasy read.
Harrow uses this novel to explore many things that she loved as a child—epic tales of knights and their horses, time travel stories—but also so much more. It is true that the histories we are taught from tend to be written by the winners, often leaving out the parts of the story they are not proud of. We are very lucky to live in a time when more voices are being published and heard, but this novel is a reminder of how important the diversity of stories really is and why we need to encourage and foster even more diverse histories to be written and taught. To better understand ourselves and to encourage empathy for the world at large, we really do need to see and hear more sides to every story.
Kari Meutsch and Kristian Preylowski co-own and run the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock.
