Book Review

The Eternal Ones

by Kirsten Miller

 “What if love refused to die?

     Haven Moore can’t control her visions of a past with a boy called Ethan, and a life in New York that ended in fiery tragedy. In our present, she designs beautiful dresses for her classmates with her best friend Beau. Dressmaking keeps her sane, since she lives with her widowed and heartbroken mother in her tyrannical grandmother’s house in Snope City, a tiny town in Tennessee. Then an impossible group of coincidences conspire to force her to flee to New York, to discover who she is, and who she was.

     In New York, Haven meets Iain Morrow and is swept into an epic love affair that feels both deeply fated and terribly dangerous. Iain is suspected of murdering a rock star and Haven wonders, could he have murdered her in a past life? She visits the Ouroboros Society and discovers a murky world of reincarnation that stretches across millennia. Haven must discover the secrets hidden in her past lives, and loves¸ before all is lost and the cycle begins again.“

     The Eternal Ones is a book revolving around the idea of past lives and reincarnation. The main character, Haven,  who lives in Snope City, Tennessee travels to New York to find out what the visions that she has had her entire life, are about. The other aspect of this book is the connection she has with Iain Morrow, who she barely knows.

     The book centres around Haven, the protagonist, as she tries to work out what her visions of the past mean, and what happened to a girl named Constance in the early 1900′s, of whom she’s been having visions of since she was little. The visions that Haven has come in bits and pieces, and not in order, so what actually happened to her kept me guessing until the end, particularly because an important player in the story wasn’t revealed until quite close to the end of the novel.

     The world that The Eternal Ones took place in was pretty much the typical urban fantasy setting, with a normal world that included a ‘fantasy’ element. The Ouroboros Society was a mystery most of the way through the novel; its purpose and who had influence within it was hard to pick throughout the novel. Like most urban fantasy novels, the part of the world that Haven was discovering throughout the novel was secret from most people, so this didn’t pose many surprises.

     I actually didn’t mind Haven too much as a protagonist; she wasn’t as naive as some, and could actually think for herself and make her own decisions (although she did make some pretty terrible ones).Beau, Haven’s gay best friend was a fairly likeable character as well. He provided a bit of a link back to normality throughout the book, while Haven was finding out about her long history.I found Iain’s character quite confusing. His motives and the entire section of the plot that involved him confused me a bit, as it kept changing, and it was hard to tell whether he was a good or bad character. However, this did all get sorted out in the end.

     There was another character (who I won’t name because it might ruin the book) who creeped me out a little (okay, a lot), but he wasn’t in the book that much, so that wasn’t too much of an issue.The plot was a little confusing, as the whole story was seen from Haven’s point of view (even though it was in third person) and she kept getting everyone’s stories and motives mixed up, however the whole thing was sorted out in the end. It wasn’t written exceptionally well, however it was written well in that it was very difficult to guess the ending.