OUR INFINITE FATES

Teens are doomed to repeatedly fall in love—and kill each other.

Welsh teen Branwen is the latest reincarnation of Evelyn, a being who’s over 1,000 years old and is fated to die, again and again, shortly before their 18th birthday. Intertwined in their fate is Arden, with whom they have fallen in love over the course of 100 lifetimes, and who is their perpetual murderer/victim: When Arden kills Evelyn, Arden immediately dies as well, and vice versa. This time, Branwen needs to stay alive long enough to donate stem cells to her sister, a leukemia patient. To do so, she’ll need to figure out who Arden is in their current form and convince them to help. The story is interspersed with chapters from their previous incarnations, offering glimpses of a variety of times and places and helping to create a sense of urgency as the mystery unfolds. Notably, they are French soldiers who die in the Great War and, in the 1930s, Algerians raised to hate the French colonizers. Steven delves into the inherently queer concept of swapping bodies and switching genders; Evelyn doesn’t have a strong attachment to living as a particular gender, but Arden expresses a preference for “being a boy.” Some of the incarnations enable the author to explore same-sex longing and romance in various contexts, although the brevity of these interludes leads at times to insufficiently nuanced representations of the cultures at hand.

An intriguing romantic fantasy with characters readers will root for.